Psychopaths are dangerous predators, but they are predictable. It is those who put them in power, and enable them, and who keep quiet that must be our focus
So true! So clear, All this demonstrates irrefutably the full and entire responsibility of the international community in the tragedies that are bleeding the world....
Thanks a lot for this brilliant exposure of a sad, very sad reality…
Another insightful piece that strips away another layer of the mystery about how Israel can continue its savage ways. Thank you Avigail. I have a question: the international community of imperialistic and powerful nations built psychopathic Israel. Is there really anyone at this point with the power to stop it?
I am asking the same question. I am sure there are many who can. There are many men and women interspersed through governments, and all their branches. If they got together and started to speak out, say ‘no', and do the right thing, things could change very quickly. It is those cowardly(?) silent people who are the problem, as I am saying in the essay. When individuals in any position tolerate the intolerable, and allow it to continue, they hurt many people. I don’t care if they make deathbed confessions when they are old and out of the system. I want them to act now. Thank you for reading!!
I think it will be possible to stop Israel and Zionism in general when there will be enough re-education and people in the world stop connecting Zionism with Jews. Until then, the idea of stopping Israel or Zionism horrifies most of the world, because they are so afraid to harm or offend Jews.
Another excellent article shining a light upon the herd-like behaviour of those who enable and accommodate these ugly sociopathic users and abusers. I resent the moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty of anyone who votes for these monsters. Get up, stand up 👍💚🇵🇸
Thank you for speaking out so forthrightly about this important, yet grievous subject. My own childhood was horrific in its own way, but very different and, I guess, non-standard. Any way to reconnect to the Book Club, that ended last month?
Thank you Joy, and I’m so sorry that your childhood was awful too. I had an email from Samer today, and there is a new series covering Prof Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Prof Khalidi will be the guest at the first meeting on Wed 2nd October, and I will be the host. Samer said they’re putting out the publicity material very soon. Visit the Book Club on Palestine FB page if you can. As soon as it is all out I will share everything here too. 🙏
I am pretty sure you are not alone. We are each unique by definition. But our species’ psychology can be so primitive that large sections of humanity would like to pretend there is some kind of sameness. Too many groups/societies demand conformity as the price of belonging. In other words, humanity ties survival to conformity with some crazy idea of sameness, or ‘being like everyone else’. Only those who think life is only about survival would do this. Those who know that life is about growing towards our potential naturally value our innate uniqueness, and the contribution this uniqueness can make to the collective. The idea of the Borg on StarTrek comes from this primitive yearning for sameness and fear of diversity. If you read my previous piece, I think I touch on some of these issues.
The more primitive the psychology, the more oppressive the group/society. It is easy against a backdrop of primitive psychology for anyone who just wants to be themselves (because it is the only way to fulfil our potential), to feel like a ‘freak’. The world tells us not to be different, but be ‘like everyone else’ as if this is possible. Most of my clients come to therapy with some version of this. . By the end of therapy we not only accept that we are unique, we embrace it. You can only be healthy psychologically if you are yourself and living life fully, not just surviving. Trying to be who we are not makes us psychologically unwell, because it is all about survival and no human being can be well when all they do is survive. 🙏🏼🌻
Me too 2. I went off Facebook a few years ago and hate when something interesting like this requires me to re-enter if I wanted to participate! I have this irrational fear of people knowing I’ve “gone in”, as if it’s a physical building where everyone can see when anyone enters or exits, and I feel exposed, unlike the way I feel on any other platform.
I don’t feel like a freak for not being on it, I just feel like there’s a huge gulf between me and anyone who’s willing to display themselves all the time. I can’t relate.
I do know it’s probably related to a different kind of traumatic exposure during childhood. Just hearing FB mentioned makes me feel anxious.
Thank you for sharing this! I feel the same way and no one seems to understand. It’s like every word you say is some kind of performance. You have to consider who might be offended when you don’t even know them maybe. Or who might be critical, or misunderstand you. To me it seems like the difference between getting together with a friend or a small group and enjoying a conversation, and being at a cocktail party with lots of people you barely know, aware that you’re on display and you have to be entertaining while weighing every word you say. I can handle that environment, it can even be fun, but not very often or for very long. Not as the primary way of communicating with my friends, which what it has become for many of them. Thanks!
Platforms like facebook are just another context where humanity interacts. If people are poorly developed, that’s what you see. If it’s a mob, it’s a mob. If it is friendly useful group, that’s what you’ll see.
In real life meetings you can see people in person. We know who the person is that says or does something. But online there is the phenomenon of ‘disinhibition’. I am sure you’ve heard about it. It is easy to hide on social media. People can do a ‘hit and run’. Say something awful to someone behind a mask or anonymously and then move on or disappear.
Those with especially primitive psychology, or people with personality disorders (damaged PFC and poor emotional and behavioural regulation) can say whatever they like, no matter how offensive or dishonest and until blocked they can get away with it. Things that people would never say in person, they feel entitled to say on FB, because they cannot see the ‘victim’ of their attack. FB and social media can depersonalise people a lot more than real life can..
This is the reason that social media accentuates the risks that exist in ordinary society. I have met some excellent people on facebook, and blocked who knows how many.
I have withdrawn from facebook completely a few years ago, and did not miss it at all. Last October I opened a new account that has nothing personal on it, that I use only for exchanging news on Palestine. Even in previous years, I was never too personal on facebook.
Remember that our limbic, survival system wants everyone to like us and everyone has a need to please people. It is not just some of us, it is everyone with the exception of psychopaths, whose limbic brains are impaired too. So if the limbic brain is in charge, everyone feels like they have to watch what they say for fear of other people’s scrutiny and because we all want to be liked even by people we do not know.
Back when we were in caves, if someone was annoying everyone there was a risk of being tossed out and having to face the ice age and sabre tooth tigers alone and without protection. Humans who were banished from their groups did not do well. We survived because we were in groups. Even if groups were oppressive, the toss up was between death or putting up with oppression, or other people’s treatment of us and the hurt or discomfort it caused. To this day, human society considers banishment or the threat of banishment the worst punishment (short of killing people), to force people to conform, and ‘behave’ as the group requires. The more primitive/oppressive the group, the greater the threat of exclusion. You can even see this play out in the school playground with how children create cliques and decide who to exclude. For children exclusion is excruciating. Children’s and teenage groups can engage in outright persecution and shaming of someone they perceive as ‘different’ and does not behave like everyone else. Children are always tense and always on their toes because, children’s groups can be absolutely awful and can be the most oppressive in society. Children and young people’s limbic brains tell them that if they are not included in the group, they will die. I meet so many clients whose family was perfectly fine, but the psychological harm done to them was at school.
The key is to integrate, and help children grow up with better integrated brain so that everyone can operate more and more out of the PFC. Then there is no need to fear our own feelings or behaviour on social media, or for that matter in any other forms of encounter with people. We can then easily withstand group oppression, and remain true to our values and principles not as a form of rebellion, but as authentic beings. Human societies that are made out of better integrated people, are not only tolerant, they welcome diversity as a strength. They are also more compassionate and thoughtful and they would be very validating and safe. Nothing like what we have now. If social media existed in a more evolved humanity, I suspect it would be a very different space than it is now.
Everything you feel is normal. Your instincts tell you that social media is not safe, and you are right to trust those instincts.
(I also have an X account that I rarely use and only for Palestine issues. I do have a FB account for my therapy practice, which I use to share information with clients and the public. I have considered closing it, but am keeping it for now as I know some people benefit from it. But I have nothing personal on social media. I spend very little time on social media. It is a great pity that it has become a way to also disseminate important information from local authorities, or other organisations. I think social media is in decline, and people are getting back to relating in a more personal way. There is a lot of technology humanity has developed that it does not yet have the psychological maturity to handle. In the wrong hands anything can be dangerous).
Thank you for sharing _your_ experience! And that is an excellent analogy of another aspect of FB I’m not comfortable with! The cocktail party can be fun, but I don’t want to have to get dressed up every time I just want to talk to a friend, and I don’t always want to talk as a threesome or foursome. Your comment about how it’s not the preferred mode of communicating with one’s friends (you would think), and that it seems to have become just that way for some of your friends reminds me of a friend I had who told me once that she was most comfortable talking about her life in the group fb chat I had participated in with her briefly, which I thought was vapid and too public. But I thought it being her “preference” was quite unusual, and I was surprised when you said that seemed to be the case with more than one person you knew!
It’s only recently that I’ve started talking about my childhood, about the abuses I suffered at the hands of those who were ( supposedly) the pillars of society. Over the years my attitude would swing back and forth on my feelings for my abusers. Abusers abuse, it’s what they do.
But my feelings for the enablers has never wavered, they are the ones I look at with contempt, they are the ones who made possible what happened to me. They knew and chose to turn a blind eye to what was happening.
An example I like to give is about a youth detention centre I was incarcerated in, for a year, when I was 13.
There were two teachers there who would reward children for “ good behaviour by taking them out at the weekend for visits to football games, movies or the Zoo etc; this happened every weekend and sometimes the other staff would get a phone call late on the Saturday from one of the teachers saying that it was late and the boy might as well stay overnight at the teachers home.
Now, when I first arrived at the detention centre I remember one of the older kids telling me… don’t be that good kid, don’t be the compliant kid in class, show just enough anger that the teachers knew you’d be trouble.
Over the years I’d think about this, if we kids knew, and we always knew, no matter where I went in life we knew , then surely the adults knew. They knew two teachers were taking kids from the centre and keeping them overnight.
Let’s just say it never helped me with trust issues towards authority figures later in life
Dear David, I am so sorry and horrified to hear about your history, and that of so many boys. I am hearing more and more stories like yours of institutional abuse coming up to the surface. I don’t know if you have already thought about this, but what was done to you and all those other boys in that youth detention centre perhaps needs to be reported. It is a personal decision always, but it is something to consider. I believe that the cases that have been coming to light all over the world, are just the tip of the iceberg. In most countries children have no rights at all. We have vague treaties on children’s rights, and ‘guidance’ on child protection, but in reality, I don’t believe that children are even defined as human in most legal system. They are more like property.
Your mistrust of authority figures is completely understandable. Why would any young person or child trust authority figures when the very people entrusted with their care can commit such a heinous betrayal, and when all those who know what is going on, say and do nothing? The message given to children and young people, or anyone in those circumstances is that by-standers’ fear of speaking out is more important than the suffering of others. Or another way of looking at it, is that we live in a world where most humans are selfish (limbic) and look out only for their own comfort and survival, and no one else matters, not even children and young people. Children are just adults in development. How are they supposed to feel, growing up into a world like this? I have had my own version of mistrust because of my parents.
The good new is that it is possible to recover. I describe everything in my short book on trauma. The myth that it is not possible to recover from a traumatic past, is just that, a myth. There has never been any evidence to claim something like this, but we have plenty of evidence of bad or ineffective therapy. My own profession has long been hijacked by neoliberalism, and is more focused on the survival and egos of therapists than it does on making any real difference to people. In other words, it is more of the same. People’s welfare is sacrificed because professionals are thinking more of their own survival than the real purpose of what they do. There are still pockets of sanity, and good therapists out there. My book Therapy Without A Therapist shows that it is possible to integrate, grow, and recover even without a therapist.
I hope your life is good despite everything that was done to you. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate your honesty. I am grateful for your generous disclosure, and of course for the time you put into reading my essay. In solidarity, Avigail 🙏🏼
I do know that the abuse suffered by me and other children when I was younger was reported and investigated, the abusers and the system that allowed the abuse being found guilty of neglect etc… I read some of the transcripts and most of what happened to me was reported by other survivors.
As for the detention centre, I’m not sure and to be honest it’s not something Iwanted to chase up, happy to live with the assumption that “ things have changed” since then ( this was in 1972-73, in Scotland).
The older I’ve got, the better I have dealt with the issue and find myself in a good state of mind as these things are investigated and more importantly survivors believed
Thank you for sharing this. Israel is, of course, a tool of American empire, and the U.S. has, I think, reached end-stage capitalism. Psychopaths are rewarded here. A surprisingly large percentage are bosses, CEO’s, billionaires, etc. And I think I read somewhere that there are more psychopaths in the U.S, per capita, than in other countries. It sounds like that’s true of Israel, as well. But what do we do about it? How can we stop these people, who lack compassion for others and think only of their own gain?
Thank you, and it is worrying to think the US has more psychopaths than elsewhere. I’m sure it is true for Israel too. Psychopaths are drawn to environments that enable them and normalise what they are, and what they do. It is known there is a disproportionate number of psychopaths in positions of power compared with the general population, which is partly why the world is such a mess. The solution is for everyone else to speak out when they see wrong and not put up with it. It’s not enough that some of us, even many of us are in the streets protesting. We need those working in places where they see wrong to find their moral back bone, stop colluding, stand up and start sabotaging the projects and systems created by psychopaths, and maintained by everyone else. We can’t continue to comfort ourselves with Hollywood movies where the good guys manage to defeat the bad guys, while in the real world it is the opposite. We need to turn fiction into reality. There is a massive army of ordinary people who are silent collaborators out there.
Thank you. Everything you say is so true. I have lost several friends since last October (or rather, they lost me), people who don't want to look too closely at the facts and don't want to upset their "liberal" Jewish friends, and so don't speak out, or continue to say things like "we have to see both sides". Maybe I'm a coward or incompetent as an activist, but I just can't be around them any more.
i related well, avigail, to your story, and well believe you. i and my sisters lived under a sociopathic/psychopathic/narcissistic mother who created the perfect family that was seen with awe and as a model by the community that included the teachers of our school, our extended family and church. amazing. my father didn't abuse us sexually, although he was a powder keg of unconscious anger that would blow up into crazy stuff from time to time. shortly before i left home, my mother confessed to having killed me as an infant, which, when she told me created a huge feeling of 'aha! now i understand.'
and i've explored aspects of this enablement too, of 'narcissists' in my current jargon. (i'm not sure i see a big difference between them.) in my most recent essay on anger, how my suppressed/denied anger has made itself manifest in my body as pain, by some strange development of ideas, came to the realisation that narcissism is the natural energetic development when a big enough percentage of a community refuse to take full responsibility for being free. as dostoyevsky has written, very clearly in *the grand inquisitor* for example, the feeling of responsibility creates so much fear, more than the fear of death, imo, that most willingly give it up to the other. that giving up of personal responsibility, at the collective level, creates an energy vacuum that will create our narcissistic structures and then populate them with narcissist. by narcissistic structures i mean the religions — my anger essay discovered that the development of buddhism is also a narcissistic structure — and the corporate structures as we have them. (a nice film on the psychopathic nature of corporation is: "The Corporation" (2003) https://youtu.be/KMNZXV7jOG0
with my recent analysis, it seems to me that your argument basically lines up with my own: stop the enablement. my answer is, 'to take full 100% personal responsibility for our own lives. to stop 100% all blame and complain which stops us looking for someone to save us and someone to blame in order to keep us in victim energy space and small.'
challenging stuff! and yet, perhaps the path to getting us through hale and hearty through the great apocalypse we are living in! we are living in amazing times, the great apocalypse.
all the best with what is changing. everything changes! with peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
Thank you Guy and first, I am so sorry to hear that you had such an appalling childhood. I know what it is like to grow up in a household that feels nightmarish and where you are afraid all the time.
Anger and fear are two sides of the same coin — both are responses to threat. Most of us experience both at the same time, but tend to be more aware of one than the other, or express one more than the other. Gender socialisation and what was wired into us from our family of origin/childhood environment, has a lot to do with which feeling men or women would tend to show more, especially in public. I will read your essay. Writing and sharing our experience and using our voice is a way of taking personal responsibility and it’s also helpful and validating to others. Thank you for your empathy and for validating me.
I do believe we must each take personal responsibility. Blame can be fun, and even necessary along our path to recovery. But it is only transitional. We have to be the change we want to see. Keeping quiet and making ourselves small is a helpful defensive, limbic strategy but limbic existence is not a life for human beings. I talk about it in my short book on trauma, and also in more detail in Therapy Without A Therapist.
I don’t believe there is real separation between what is personal and what is political. The two are part of a complex system. We affect the whole and the whole affects us. The direction we take, how we behave in the world, whether or not we are able to take responsibility for ourselves and insist on integrating and growing to our potential will have an impact on what the collective field would look like. Every person matters. It is good to meet you. Thank you for reading and for using your voice. 🙏🏼
i assure you there is no need to apologise, although i do appreciate the sentiment of connection it is expressing, our opening up to the base of yogic realisation of being alive: intimacy within ourselves to allow intimacy with each other.
'blame can be fun!' lol! so true, which is why the so-called lefties love the chaos they are creating. stuck in youthful blame complain deluded into thinking that that has the power to fix perceived wrongs. it really is funny, even as it is temporarily destructive and/or chaotic.
i like the title of your book 'therapy without a therapist'.
and there is no separation between the personal, the social and the political. last year i had an astounding epiphany during a meditation: a body-centric awareness of the 'true' meaning of karma. well, true as of that moment. interestingly enough, that experience has stayed with me and this year expanded when i realised that 'karma', 'synchronicity' and gautama buddha's great awakening to 'dependence co-arising' are describing the same thing! each moment is the point of our life, and that each moment point is intimately connected to every other moment point in the universe. i'm still working through that in my body experience of the now. that awareness has been greatly aided by a psyche-somatic resonance awareness process i have been using and honing since about 2015. the body doesn't lie and, more than that, knows what is true and what is important in the moment. our body has the wisdom to great optimal health, to keep us alive in times of danger — so long as we rest into it intimately.
and it is great to meet you as well. (i followed someone's like of a comment i wrote to see who/what else they like. and, here you are.)
all the best with what is changing. everything changes. with peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
p.s.: you may find this interesting because it examines how our use of common widely accepted and unseen language destroys our ability to be truly intimate. my discovery of this has created a huge change in my ability to be 100% responsible for this life i'm experiencing. no pressure, only if your body-intuition directs you to consider it:
"Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks: Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words."
Thanks Adam, I’ll have a look. Just published another piece and I suspect that despite my sincere efforts there will be typing errors. But please do not feel any obligation to to proofread or correct. A.
"But I do want to know what goes through the minds of those who say nothing, when they know exactly what is going on around them."
I think what they would say is that they have a mortgage to pay and a family to raise, and that being an activist is not their calling in life nor something that they are temperamentally suited to. They might also say that their sacrifice wouldn't make any difference.
I would certainly like to have a really clear psychological explanation of how society and the media is able to so effectively brainwash so many people into believing that sending weapons to Israel whilst it is carrying out mass murder is somehow respectable whilst the pro-Palestine protest represent a threat to society. I think that the simple answer is that we are, to a very considerable extent, driven by the consequence of our conditioning combined with our perception of our interests and needs. Whilst most people abide by the norms of society, rationality and a strong commitment to principled ethics does not feature especially strongly in the thinking and lived behaviour of most people.
“Modern humanity is distinguished by Palaeolithic emotions, Medieval institutions … and god-like technology. We’re a mixed up, and in many ways archaic species in transition. We are a chimera of evolution.”
In other words, we are a complete mess, and not well put together. This is why I have a job. I believe you have read my book Therapy Without A Therapist? There is a way to straighten the mess that we are in and most people are capable of achieving better brain functioning that correlates with maturity and with being ethical, empathetic and harmless to one another among other things.
Dear Avigail, thank you for such honest and painful talk. However, I would certainly make a difference between really mentally damaged person (psychopath) and subconscious compliance with the society's norms and customs. That was also a subject of Carl Jung's reflection when he was speaking about why Germans admired Nazism and went along with their ideology despite the horror that Nazism was inflicting on humanity.
For instance, even if we don't talk about why the majority supports and cheers on mass-extermination of human beings, we can look at how children are being raised. That a mother sees her child as a continuation of her own body and therefore, a subject to her will. Authoritarian oppressive parenting is being encouraged in many societies. Some societies even deny the child any will at all, including marriage, education and interests. But that does not mean psychopathy. It is a tradition. In the USSR, the tradition was to expect obedience and submission from a child. People believed that punishment and aggressive disapproval will prevent the child from repeating mistakes. In Israel, everyone believes that there is eternal hatred of Jews in the world and that they must be strong and never have any humanitarian considerations, otherwise they will be all annihilated. Golda Meir said something in this direction: "I do not want Jews to be humanitarian, leftist, compassionate... and dead". I am not sure that it can be classified as psychopathy. They are simply raised believing that if they don't kill - they will be killed, if they don't torture and rape - they will be the victims instead, if they don't show their power of destruction, people will stop being afraid of them and will kill the Jews again... I apologize for this unclear comment, perhaps you see what I mean...
Thank you Lena and everything you say is true. I have written something about this elsewhere, including in the previous essay. In this one I meant to focus on the issue that ‘ordinary’ people who are non-psychopaths, as in their brains are perfectly fine, enable leaders/managers/people in power who are diagnosable. When things go pear-shaped ordinary people then blame the psychopaths for all the ills of society instead of looking at what they are contributing to in their jobs, and everyday life. So my point was that no psychopath can do anything on their own. They are enabled by ‘ordinary’ non-pathological people.
Having said that, anyone who is brutal to their children, or causes harm to others under whatever rationale, be it ‘social customs’, believing that it is ‘good for the child’s survival’ etc, should have something kick in in them that would stop them when they cause suffering. This regulating mechanism is in our prefrontal cortex (PFC).
As I explain in my previous essay, we are born with an adaptation that enables the limbic system to weaken, or completely shut down the prefrontal cortex, the moment we feel triggered into threat. Every human being alive would have experienced this at least once in their life, but more likely much more than once.
The problem with this mechanism is that as soon as we are under threat, we lose all our ‘higher’ human capacities, such as empathy, ability to think clearly, our sense of identity, our ability to regulate emotions and behaviour, ability to plan ahead, perspective, self-awareness, our concerns for the way we impact on others, and more. The integrative work we do in therapy prevents this from happening as we inceasingly integrate the limbic system (survival) with the prefrontal cortex. I believe you have my book Therapy Without A Therapist. It is all there.
The point is that ordinary people can do, or enable others to do a great deal of horrible stuff when they are triggered. Frightened people are dangerous, and they do not need to be psychopaths at all. Most human beings have a fully functional brain. But under threat, when they lose all the capacities, and abilities that make us human, they can become temporarily like psychopaths because their higher functions are shut down. What psychopathic leaders tell them would make sense to them in that state. About 50% of the population in relatively safe and healthy sections of society also have trauma, which predisposes the person to live almost permanently in a state of survival. It means their PFC is shut down a lot more of the time compared with people who do not have trauma. So anyone who inflicts trauma on children can cause generations of people who live in a permanent state of fear. As a former sufferer of trauma I know exactly what this feels like.
Psychopaths have a permanent impairment of the PFC. With non-psychopaths it would be temporary, only when the person feels under threat. But it’s no good to anyone if people directly commit, or enable atrocities, and then wake up to themselves after the harm was already done.
Having said that, you need to know that the Israeli soldiers committing the genocide in Gaza and the OWB are not ordinary infantry. They only have elite units in there, and it is for a good reason. Those so-called elite units, genuinely have a disproportionate number of diagnosable psychopaths among them. They are carefully selected for it. Israel knows that ordinary soldiers would find it hard to follow orders, which is why they have those ‘elite’ units there.
Thanks you for reading and the excellent comment, Lena.
Of course! I just want to encourage those who keep quiet and criticise the bad guys without recognising the responsibility that they themselves bear for the way things are. Thanks for reading. 🙏🏼
"The question we are confronting is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. It calls for conceptual clarification, not for experimental investigation. One cannot investigate experimentally whether brains do or do not think, believe, guess, reason, form hypotheses, etc. until one knows what it would be for a brain to do so – that is, until we are clear about the meanings of these phrases and know what (if anything) counts as a brain’ s doing these things and what sort of evidence would support the ascription of such attributes to the brain. (One cannot look for the poles of the Earth until one knows what a pole is – that is, what the expression ‘pole’ means, and also what counts as finding a pole of the Earth. Otherwise, like Winnie-the-Pooh, one might embark on an expedition to the East Pole.) The moot question is: does it make sense to ascribe such attributes to the brain? Is there any such thing as a brain’ s thinking, believing, etc.? (Is there any such thing as the East Pole?)
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made a profound remark that bears directly on our concerns. ‘Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’ This epitomizes the conclusions we shall reach in our investigation. Stated with his customary terseness, it needs elaboration, and its ramifications need to be elucidated.
The point is not a factual one. It is not a matter of fact that only human beings and what behaves like human beings can be said to be the subject of these psychological predicates. If it were, then it might indeed be a discovery, recently made by neuroscientists, that brains too see and hear, think and believe, ask and answer questions, form hypotheses and make guesses on the basis of information. Such a discovery would, to be sure, show that it is not only of a human being and what behaves like a human being that one can say such things. This would be astonishing, and we should want to hear more. We should want to know what the evidence for this remarkable discovery was. But, of course, it is not like this. The ascription of psychological attributes to the brain is not warranted by a neuroscientific discovery which shows that, contrary to our previous convictions, brains do think and reason, just as we do ourselves. The neuroscientists, psychologists and cognitive scientists who adopt these forms of description have not done so as a result of observations which show that brains think and reason. Susan Savage-Rambaugh has produced striking evidence to show that bonobo chimpanzees, appropriately trained and taught, can ask and answer questions, can reason in a rudimentary fashion, give and obey orders and so on. The evidence lies in their behaviour – in what they do (including how they employ symbols) in their interactions with us. This was indeed very surprising. For no one thought that such abilities could be acquired by apes. But it would be absurd to think that the ascription of cognitive and cogitative attributes to the brain rests on comparable evidence. It would be absurd because we do not even know what would show that the brain has such attributes. Just compare the behavioural repertoire of a bonobo chimpanzee, a fortiori the behavioural repertoire of a human being, with that of a human brain.
Why, then, was this form of description, and the forms of explanation that are dependent upon it, adopted without argument or reflection? We suspect that the answer is: as a result of an unthinking adherence to a mutant form of Cartesianism. It was a characteristic feature of Cartesian dualism to ascribe psychological predicates to the mind, and only derivatively to the human being. Sherrington and his pupils Eccles and Penfield cleaved to a form of dualism in their reflections on the relationship between their neurological discoveries and human perceptual and cognitive capacities. Their successors rejected the dualism – quite rightly. But the predicates which dualists ascribed to the immaterial mind, the third generation of brain neuroscientists applied unreflectively to the brain instead. It was no more than an apparently innocuous corollary of rejecting the two-substance dualism of Cartesianism in neuroscience. These scientists proceeded to explain human perceptual and cognitive powers and their exercise by reference to the brain’ s exercise of its cognitive and perceptual abilities.
It is our contention that this application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense."
~ Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2022, Wiley Blackwell.
I'm commenting on what appears to be a reductionist materialist explanation you seem to be offering for this psychopathy and how this ‘interpretation’ lacks conceptual clarity, which could cloud any sort of description of the problems you are trying to outline?
A few Examples:
"Psychopaths have an impaired executive, and also an impaired limbic brain. Unlike people with healthy brains, an impaired limbic system makes psychopaths unable to generate normal feelings in response to what goes on around them."
"Some psychopaths are born without the ability to develop a proper, fully human brain."
"Their brains might have trauma wired in, but their executive is intact, and so is their neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to wire and re-wire itself all through life."
Bennett and Hacker:
"Many brain-neuroscientists have an implicit belief in reductionism. Few try to articulate what exactly they mean by this term of art. Among those who do, the most lucid statement of the common conception of reductionism with respect to cognitive neuroscience that we have found is given by Francis Crick in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis. Indeed, one reductionist thesis that Crick defends is also what he holds to be the eponymous ‘astonishing hypothesis’: namely, that ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ It does not, Crick avers, ‘come easily to believe that I am the detailed behaviour of a set of nerve cells’, but in fact it is so. This conception appears to be a form of ontological reductionism, inasmuch as it holds that one kind of entity is, despite appearances to the contrary, actually no more than a structure of other kinds of entity. Side by side with the ontological reductionism, Crick also defends a form of explanatory reductionism: ‘The scientific belief is that our minds – the behaviour of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.’ The reductionist approach, Crick explains, is that
‘a complex system can be explained by the behaviour of its parts and their interactions with each other. For a system with many levels of activity, this process may have to be repeated more than once – that is, the behaviour of a particular part may have to be explained by the properties of its parts and their interactions. For example, to understand the brain we may need to know the many interactions of nerve cells with each other; in addition, the behaviour of each nerve cell may need explanation in terms of the ions and molecules of which it is composed.’
Reductionism, Crick holds, is ‘the main theoretical method that has driven the development of physics, chemistry and molecular biology. It is largely responsible for the spectacular developments of modern science. It is the only way to proceed until and unless we are confronted with strong experimental evidence that demands we modify our attitude.' Colin Blakemore propounded a similar form of reductionism, with a more epiphenomenalist emphasis, in his BBC lectures The Mind Machine.
‘All our actions are products of our brains … We feel ourselves, usually, to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of the brain, whose machinery has been designed, on the basis of its functional utility, by means of natural selection.We are machines, but machines so wonderfully sophisticated that no one should count it as an insult to be called such a machine. …
The sense of will is an invention of the brain. Like so much of what the brain does, the feeling of choice is a mental model – a plausible account of how we act, which tells us no more about how decisions are really taken in the brain than our perception of the world tells us about the computations involved in deriving it.’
Such assertions as these – namely, that human beings are machines, or that the behaviour of a human being is no more than the behaviour of their nerve cells, or that decisions are taken in and (apparently) by the brain – are not science but metaphysics. Whether such venerable metaphysical pictures are rendered any more plausible by modern science than they were in antiquity by Democritus, Epicurus or Lucretius more than 2,000 years ago is of some interest. Precisely because the various forms of ontological and explanatory reductionism are metaphysical theses concerning the logic of existential attributions and the logical structures of explanation, they are not open to scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. If they are to be confirmed or confuted, then it will be by analytical argument.
In order to evaluate such reductionist claims, it is necessary first to clarify what reductionism is and what forms it may take. In the broadest sense, reductionism is the commitment to a single unifying explanation of a type of phenomenon. In this sense, Marxism advocates a reductive explanation of history, and psychoanalysis defends a reductive explanation of human behaviour. More specifically, reductionism in science is a commitment to the complete explanation of the nature and behaviour of entities of a given type in terms of the nature and behaviour of their constituents. The ideal of ‘unified science’, advocated by the Vienna Circle positivists in the 1920s and 1930s and adopted by the later logical empiricists in the 1950s, was committed to what has been called ‘classical reductionism’.
This conception held that the objects of which the world consists can be classified into hierarchies such that the objects at each level of classification are composed of objects comprising a lower level. The lowest level was conceived to be constituted by the elementary particles investigated by fundamental physics. Above this, in successive levels, are atoms, molecules, cells, multicellular organisms and social groups. Investigating each level is the task of a given science (or sciences) the purpose of which is to discover the laws that describe the behaviour of entities of the kind in question. The reductivist programme is to derive the laws of any given level from the different laws describing the behaviour of entities at the lower level. Derivational reduction, thus conceived, requires, in addition to the laws at the reduced and reducing levels, bridge principles identifying the kinds of objects at the reduced level with specific structures of objects comprising the reducing level.
Reductionism, in its classical form, was a bold and sweeping thesis about ontology and about the logical character of scientific explanation. It was an eminently philosophical thesis, driven by two primary considerations. The first was the apparently successful reduction, in a few domains of science, of fragments of one science to elements of another. So, for example, the interactions between stuffs of various kinds is successfully explained in terms of the atomic and valency theories of chemistry. The second was a deep commitment to metaphysical materialism, which is an ontological doctrine typically propounded in opposition to Cartesian dualism. In its simplest and warranted form, it amounts to a denial that there are mental or spiritual substances. In its simplest and crudest form, it involves the claim that everything that exists is material. In this form, it claims that the mind is the brain (hence the proliferation in recent years, in the wake of Noam Chomsky, of the misconceived phrase ‘the mind/brain’).
In less simple and crude form, it is the claim that mental states, events and processes are in fact neural states, events and processes, that mental attributes are in fact identical with neural ones.
Ontological materialism has little to be said for it. Denial that there are mental or spiritual substances does not imply that the only things that exist are material objects (and material stuffs). For evidently laws and legal systems, numbers and theorems, games and plays, are neither material objects nor stuffs. Indeed, the colours, lengths and weights of material objects, not to mention their capacities and dispositions, are not themselves material things, although it makes perfectly good sense to speak of there being such properties as colours, lengths and weights, and such dispositions as solubility and elasticity. More importantly, wars, revolutions and cultures, performances of plays, birthday parties and funerals, are not material objects – but there are such things, they occur, happen, or exist at a time or for a time.
One might modify the claim: everything there is, one might suggest, is made of, or consists of, matter. But this is just as misconceived, since laws and legal systems, numbers and theorems, games and plays, political parties, a society and its culture, inflation and economic growth, are not made of matter and do not consist of matter. Moreover, denial that there are immaterial substances does not imply that the only thing relevant to the explanation of the properties and/or behaviour of things that do exist – indeed, even of material things that exist – is the matter of which they are made. Organs and artefacts are explained primarily by reference to their function, not merely by reference to their material constitution. The behaviour of sentient creatures in general is explained partly in terms of their goals, and of human beings in particular also in terms of reasons and motives, not in terms of the material of which they consist. Even more obviously, the explanation of events and processes such as Hannibal’ s victory at Cannae, or the decline of the Roman Empire, the Industrial Revolution or the rise of Romanticism has nothing to do with the matter of which the explananda are made, since they are not made of anything.”
I hope this clears up any confusion as to what I am attempting to bring to your attention?
So true! So clear, All this demonstrates irrefutably the full and entire responsibility of the international community in the tragedies that are bleeding the world....
Thanks a lot for this brilliant exposure of a sad, very sad reality…
Thanks for this riveting article, Avigail.
I really appreciate you naming the enablers as a huge part of the problem.
That's how I see western leaders and mainstream media right now, and they're losing all credibility in my eyes and, I hope, in the eyes of others.
You’re in good company Diana! Thank you. 🙏
Another insightful piece that strips away another layer of the mystery about how Israel can continue its savage ways. Thank you Avigail. I have a question: the international community of imperialistic and powerful nations built psychopathic Israel. Is there really anyone at this point with the power to stop it?
I am asking the same question. I am sure there are many who can. There are many men and women interspersed through governments, and all their branches. If they got together and started to speak out, say ‘no', and do the right thing, things could change very quickly. It is those cowardly(?) silent people who are the problem, as I am saying in the essay. When individuals in any position tolerate the intolerable, and allow it to continue, they hurt many people. I don’t care if they make deathbed confessions when they are old and out of the system. I want them to act now. Thank you for reading!!
I think it will be possible to stop Israel and Zionism in general when there will be enough re-education and people in the world stop connecting Zionism with Jews. Until then, the idea of stopping Israel or Zionism horrifies most of the world, because they are so afraid to harm or offend Jews.
Hi Avigail, check out Macklemore's latest release. He's doing a great job of bringing the free Palestine message into pop culture: https://youtu.be/bjtDsd0g468?si=Wb-6fApqIwmdPMYe
Thanks Adam. Will do.
Another excellent article shining a light upon the herd-like behaviour of those who enable and accommodate these ugly sociopathic users and abusers. I resent the moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty of anyone who votes for these monsters. Get up, stand up 👍💚🇵🇸
Hear hear!!
Thank you for speaking out so forthrightly about this important, yet grievous subject. My own childhood was horrific in its own way, but very different and, I guess, non-standard. Any way to reconnect to the Book Club, that ended last month?
Thank you Joy, and I’m so sorry that your childhood was awful too. I had an email from Samer today, and there is a new series covering Prof Rashid Khalidi’s book, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine. Prof Khalidi will be the guest at the first meeting on Wed 2nd October, and I will be the host. Samer said they’re putting out the publicity material very soon. Visit the Book Club on Palestine FB page if you can. As soon as it is all out I will share everything here too. 🙏
Thank you Avigail. I am not on FaceBook, so any information from you, so I can attend, would be very welcome.
Me too. I'm glad there's someone else who's not on Facebook! sometimes I feel like a freak, but there are so many reasons.
I am pretty sure you are not alone. We are each unique by definition. But our species’ psychology can be so primitive that large sections of humanity would like to pretend there is some kind of sameness. Too many groups/societies demand conformity as the price of belonging. In other words, humanity ties survival to conformity with some crazy idea of sameness, or ‘being like everyone else’. Only those who think life is only about survival would do this. Those who know that life is about growing towards our potential naturally value our innate uniqueness, and the contribution this uniqueness can make to the collective. The idea of the Borg on StarTrek comes from this primitive yearning for sameness and fear of diversity. If you read my previous piece, I think I touch on some of these issues.
The more primitive the psychology, the more oppressive the group/society. It is easy against a backdrop of primitive psychology for anyone who just wants to be themselves (because it is the only way to fulfil our potential), to feel like a ‘freak’. The world tells us not to be different, but be ‘like everyone else’ as if this is possible. Most of my clients come to therapy with some version of this. . By the end of therapy we not only accept that we are unique, we embrace it. You can only be healthy psychologically if you are yourself and living life fully, not just surviving. Trying to be who we are not makes us psychologically unwell, because it is all about survival and no human being can be well when all they do is survive. 🙏🏼🌻
Me too 2. I went off Facebook a few years ago and hate when something interesting like this requires me to re-enter if I wanted to participate! I have this irrational fear of people knowing I’ve “gone in”, as if it’s a physical building where everyone can see when anyone enters or exits, and I feel exposed, unlike the way I feel on any other platform.
I don’t feel like a freak for not being on it, I just feel like there’s a huge gulf between me and anyone who’s willing to display themselves all the time. I can’t relate.
I do know it’s probably related to a different kind of traumatic exposure during childhood. Just hearing FB mentioned makes me feel anxious.
Thank you for sharing this! I feel the same way and no one seems to understand. It’s like every word you say is some kind of performance. You have to consider who might be offended when you don’t even know them maybe. Or who might be critical, or misunderstand you. To me it seems like the difference between getting together with a friend or a small group and enjoying a conversation, and being at a cocktail party with lots of people you barely know, aware that you’re on display and you have to be entertaining while weighing every word you say. I can handle that environment, it can even be fun, but not very often or for very long. Not as the primary way of communicating with my friends, which what it has become for many of them. Thanks!
Platforms like facebook are just another context where humanity interacts. If people are poorly developed, that’s what you see. If it’s a mob, it’s a mob. If it is friendly useful group, that’s what you’ll see.
In real life meetings you can see people in person. We know who the person is that says or does something. But online there is the phenomenon of ‘disinhibition’. I am sure you’ve heard about it. It is easy to hide on social media. People can do a ‘hit and run’. Say something awful to someone behind a mask or anonymously and then move on or disappear.
Those with especially primitive psychology, or people with personality disorders (damaged PFC and poor emotional and behavioural regulation) can say whatever they like, no matter how offensive or dishonest and until blocked they can get away with it. Things that people would never say in person, they feel entitled to say on FB, because they cannot see the ‘victim’ of their attack. FB and social media can depersonalise people a lot more than real life can..
This is the reason that social media accentuates the risks that exist in ordinary society. I have met some excellent people on facebook, and blocked who knows how many.
I have withdrawn from facebook completely a few years ago, and did not miss it at all. Last October I opened a new account that has nothing personal on it, that I use only for exchanging news on Palestine. Even in previous years, I was never too personal on facebook.
Remember that our limbic, survival system wants everyone to like us and everyone has a need to please people. It is not just some of us, it is everyone with the exception of psychopaths, whose limbic brains are impaired too. So if the limbic brain is in charge, everyone feels like they have to watch what they say for fear of other people’s scrutiny and because we all want to be liked even by people we do not know.
Back when we were in caves, if someone was annoying everyone there was a risk of being tossed out and having to face the ice age and sabre tooth tigers alone and without protection. Humans who were banished from their groups did not do well. We survived because we were in groups. Even if groups were oppressive, the toss up was between death or putting up with oppression, or other people’s treatment of us and the hurt or discomfort it caused. To this day, human society considers banishment or the threat of banishment the worst punishment (short of killing people), to force people to conform, and ‘behave’ as the group requires. The more primitive/oppressive the group, the greater the threat of exclusion. You can even see this play out in the school playground with how children create cliques and decide who to exclude. For children exclusion is excruciating. Children’s and teenage groups can engage in outright persecution and shaming of someone they perceive as ‘different’ and does not behave like everyone else. Children are always tense and always on their toes because, children’s groups can be absolutely awful and can be the most oppressive in society. Children and young people’s limbic brains tell them that if they are not included in the group, they will die. I meet so many clients whose family was perfectly fine, but the psychological harm done to them was at school.
The key is to integrate, and help children grow up with better integrated brain so that everyone can operate more and more out of the PFC. Then there is no need to fear our own feelings or behaviour on social media, or for that matter in any other forms of encounter with people. We can then easily withstand group oppression, and remain true to our values and principles not as a form of rebellion, but as authentic beings. Human societies that are made out of better integrated people, are not only tolerant, they welcome diversity as a strength. They are also more compassionate and thoughtful and they would be very validating and safe. Nothing like what we have now. If social media existed in a more evolved humanity, I suspect it would be a very different space than it is now.
Everything you feel is normal. Your instincts tell you that social media is not safe, and you are right to trust those instincts.
(I also have an X account that I rarely use and only for Palestine issues. I do have a FB account for my therapy practice, which I use to share information with clients and the public. I have considered closing it, but am keeping it for now as I know some people benefit from it. But I have nothing personal on social media. I spend very little time on social media. It is a great pity that it has become a way to also disseminate important information from local authorities, or other organisations. I think social media is in decline, and people are getting back to relating in a more personal way. There is a lot of technology humanity has developed that it does not yet have the psychological maturity to handle. In the wrong hands anything can be dangerous).
Thank you for sharing _your_ experience! And that is an excellent analogy of another aspect of FB I’m not comfortable with! The cocktail party can be fun, but I don’t want to have to get dressed up every time I just want to talk to a friend, and I don’t always want to talk as a threesome or foursome. Your comment about how it’s not the preferred mode of communicating with one’s friends (you would think), and that it seems to have become just that way for some of your friends reminds me of a friend I had who told me once that she was most comfortable talking about her life in the group fb chat I had participated in with her briefly, which I thought was vapid and too public. But I thought it being her “preference” was quite unusual, and I was surprised when you said that seemed to be the case with more than one person you knew!
Rereading your response Avigail, I realize there’s a lot of what you’re explaining/describing that’s behind it too.
It’s only recently that I’ve started talking about my childhood, about the abuses I suffered at the hands of those who were ( supposedly) the pillars of society. Over the years my attitude would swing back and forth on my feelings for my abusers. Abusers abuse, it’s what they do.
But my feelings for the enablers has never wavered, they are the ones I look at with contempt, they are the ones who made possible what happened to me. They knew and chose to turn a blind eye to what was happening.
An example I like to give is about a youth detention centre I was incarcerated in, for a year, when I was 13.
There were two teachers there who would reward children for “ good behaviour by taking them out at the weekend for visits to football games, movies or the Zoo etc; this happened every weekend and sometimes the other staff would get a phone call late on the Saturday from one of the teachers saying that it was late and the boy might as well stay overnight at the teachers home.
Now, when I first arrived at the detention centre I remember one of the older kids telling me… don’t be that good kid, don’t be the compliant kid in class, show just enough anger that the teachers knew you’d be trouble.
Over the years I’d think about this, if we kids knew, and we always knew, no matter where I went in life we knew , then surely the adults knew. They knew two teachers were taking kids from the centre and keeping them overnight.
Let’s just say it never helped me with trust issues towards authority figures later in life
Dear David, I am so sorry and horrified to hear about your history, and that of so many boys. I am hearing more and more stories like yours of institutional abuse coming up to the surface. I don’t know if you have already thought about this, but what was done to you and all those other boys in that youth detention centre perhaps needs to be reported. It is a personal decision always, but it is something to consider. I believe that the cases that have been coming to light all over the world, are just the tip of the iceberg. In most countries children have no rights at all. We have vague treaties on children’s rights, and ‘guidance’ on child protection, but in reality, I don’t believe that children are even defined as human in most legal system. They are more like property.
Your mistrust of authority figures is completely understandable. Why would any young person or child trust authority figures when the very people entrusted with their care can commit such a heinous betrayal, and when all those who know what is going on, say and do nothing? The message given to children and young people, or anyone in those circumstances is that by-standers’ fear of speaking out is more important than the suffering of others. Or another way of looking at it, is that we live in a world where most humans are selfish (limbic) and look out only for their own comfort and survival, and no one else matters, not even children and young people. Children are just adults in development. How are they supposed to feel, growing up into a world like this? I have had my own version of mistrust because of my parents.
The good new is that it is possible to recover. I describe everything in my short book on trauma. The myth that it is not possible to recover from a traumatic past, is just that, a myth. There has never been any evidence to claim something like this, but we have plenty of evidence of bad or ineffective therapy. My own profession has long been hijacked by neoliberalism, and is more focused on the survival and egos of therapists than it does on making any real difference to people. In other words, it is more of the same. People’s welfare is sacrificed because professionals are thinking more of their own survival than the real purpose of what they do. There are still pockets of sanity, and good therapists out there. My book Therapy Without A Therapist shows that it is possible to integrate, grow, and recover even without a therapist.
I hope your life is good despite everything that was done to you. I want you to know how deeply I appreciate your honesty. I am grateful for your generous disclosure, and of course for the time you put into reading my essay. In solidarity, Avigail 🙏🏼
I do know that the abuse suffered by me and other children when I was younger was reported and investigated, the abusers and the system that allowed the abuse being found guilty of neglect etc… I read some of the transcripts and most of what happened to me was reported by other survivors.
As for the detention centre, I’m not sure and to be honest it’s not something Iwanted to chase up, happy to live with the assumption that “ things have changed” since then ( this was in 1972-73, in Scotland).
The older I’ve got, the better I have dealt with the issue and find myself in a good state of mind as these things are investigated and more importantly survivors believed
So please do to hear, David! Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this. Israel is, of course, a tool of American empire, and the U.S. has, I think, reached end-stage capitalism. Psychopaths are rewarded here. A surprisingly large percentage are bosses, CEO’s, billionaires, etc. And I think I read somewhere that there are more psychopaths in the U.S, per capita, than in other countries. It sounds like that’s true of Israel, as well. But what do we do about it? How can we stop these people, who lack compassion for others and think only of their own gain?
Thank you, and it is worrying to think the US has more psychopaths than elsewhere. I’m sure it is true for Israel too. Psychopaths are drawn to environments that enable them and normalise what they are, and what they do. It is known there is a disproportionate number of psychopaths in positions of power compared with the general population, which is partly why the world is such a mess. The solution is for everyone else to speak out when they see wrong and not put up with it. It’s not enough that some of us, even many of us are in the streets protesting. We need those working in places where they see wrong to find their moral back bone, stop colluding, stand up and start sabotaging the projects and systems created by psychopaths, and maintained by everyone else. We can’t continue to comfort ourselves with Hollywood movies where the good guys manage to defeat the bad guys, while in the real world it is the opposite. We need to turn fiction into reality. There is a massive army of ordinary people who are silent collaborators out there.
Thank you. Everything you say is so true. I have lost several friends since last October (or rather, they lost me), people who don't want to look too closely at the facts and don't want to upset their "liberal" Jewish friends, and so don't speak out, or continue to say things like "we have to see both sides". Maybe I'm a coward or incompetent as an activist, but I just can't be around them any more.
i related well, avigail, to your story, and well believe you. i and my sisters lived under a sociopathic/psychopathic/narcissistic mother who created the perfect family that was seen with awe and as a model by the community that included the teachers of our school, our extended family and church. amazing. my father didn't abuse us sexually, although he was a powder keg of unconscious anger that would blow up into crazy stuff from time to time. shortly before i left home, my mother confessed to having killed me as an infant, which, when she told me created a huge feeling of 'aha! now i understand.'
and i've explored aspects of this enablement too, of 'narcissists' in my current jargon. (i'm not sure i see a big difference between them.) in my most recent essay on anger, how my suppressed/denied anger has made itself manifest in my body as pain, by some strange development of ideas, came to the realisation that narcissism is the natural energetic development when a big enough percentage of a community refuse to take full responsibility for being free. as dostoyevsky has written, very clearly in *the grand inquisitor* for example, the feeling of responsibility creates so much fear, more than the fear of death, imo, that most willingly give it up to the other. that giving up of personal responsibility, at the collective level, creates an energy vacuum that will create our narcissistic structures and then populate them with narcissist. by narcissistic structures i mean the religions — my anger essay discovered that the development of buddhism is also a narcissistic structure — and the corporate structures as we have them. (a nice film on the psychopathic nature of corporation is: "The Corporation" (2003) https://youtu.be/KMNZXV7jOG0
with my recent analysis, it seems to me that your argument basically lines up with my own: stop the enablement. my answer is, 'to take full 100% personal responsibility for our own lives. to stop 100% all blame and complain which stops us looking for someone to save us and someone to blame in order to keep us in victim energy space and small.'
challenging stuff! and yet, perhaps the path to getting us through hale and hearty through the great apocalypse we are living in! we are living in amazing times, the great apocalypse.
all the best with what is changing. everything changes! with peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
Thank you Guy and first, I am so sorry to hear that you had such an appalling childhood. I know what it is like to grow up in a household that feels nightmarish and where you are afraid all the time.
Anger and fear are two sides of the same coin — both are responses to threat. Most of us experience both at the same time, but tend to be more aware of one than the other, or express one more than the other. Gender socialisation and what was wired into us from our family of origin/childhood environment, has a lot to do with which feeling men or women would tend to show more, especially in public. I will read your essay. Writing and sharing our experience and using our voice is a way of taking personal responsibility and it’s also helpful and validating to others. Thank you for your empathy and for validating me.
I do believe we must each take personal responsibility. Blame can be fun, and even necessary along our path to recovery. But it is only transitional. We have to be the change we want to see. Keeping quiet and making ourselves small is a helpful defensive, limbic strategy but limbic existence is not a life for human beings. I talk about it in my short book on trauma, and also in more detail in Therapy Without A Therapist.
I don’t believe there is real separation between what is personal and what is political. The two are part of a complex system. We affect the whole and the whole affects us. The direction we take, how we behave in the world, whether or not we are able to take responsibility for ourselves and insist on integrating and growing to our potential will have an impact on what the collective field would look like. Every person matters. It is good to meet you. Thank you for reading and for using your voice. 🙏🏼
hola, avigail.
i assure you there is no need to apologise, although i do appreciate the sentiment of connection it is expressing, our opening up to the base of yogic realisation of being alive: intimacy within ourselves to allow intimacy with each other.
'blame can be fun!' lol! so true, which is why the so-called lefties love the chaos they are creating. stuck in youthful blame complain deluded into thinking that that has the power to fix perceived wrongs. it really is funny, even as it is temporarily destructive and/or chaotic.
i like the title of your book 'therapy without a therapist'.
and there is no separation between the personal, the social and the political. last year i had an astounding epiphany during a meditation: a body-centric awareness of the 'true' meaning of karma. well, true as of that moment. interestingly enough, that experience has stayed with me and this year expanded when i realised that 'karma', 'synchronicity' and gautama buddha's great awakening to 'dependence co-arising' are describing the same thing! each moment is the point of our life, and that each moment point is intimately connected to every other moment point in the universe. i'm still working through that in my body experience of the now. that awareness has been greatly aided by a psyche-somatic resonance awareness process i have been using and honing since about 2015. the body doesn't lie and, more than that, knows what is true and what is important in the moment. our body has the wisdom to great optimal health, to keep us alive in times of danger — so long as we rest into it intimately.
and it is great to meet you as well. (i followed someone's like of a comment i wrote to see who/what else they like. and, here you are.)
all the best with what is changing. everything changes. with peace, respect, love and exuberant joy.
p.s.: you may find this interesting because it examines how our use of common widely accepted and unseen language destroys our ability to be truly intimate. my discovery of this has created a huge change in my ability to be 100% responsible for this life i'm experiencing. no pressure, only if your body-intuition directs you to consider it:
"Spell Breaking Language-Keys to Unlock Language Locks: Unseen Stockholm Syndrome And Other Oddities of Being Alive in a MisSpelled See of Words."
https://gduperreault.substack.com/p/spell-breaking-language-keys-to-unlock
I've sent just a few proofing suggestions to your enquiries@... email address.
Thanks Adam, I’ll have a look. Just published another piece and I suspect that despite my sincere efforts there will be typing errors. But please do not feel any obligation to to proofread or correct. A.
I've taken a look at it and emailed you some suggestions. It's very hard-hitting and to the point.
Thanks Adam, just made all the changes you suggested, and responded to you by email. I am grateful as always. A .
It's a great pleasure for me to be able to honour and support your brave testimony in this way.
You’re very kind, Adam. I appreciate it very much.
"But I do want to know what goes through the minds of those who say nothing, when they know exactly what is going on around them."
I think what they would say is that they have a mortgage to pay and a family to raise, and that being an activist is not their calling in life nor something that they are temperamentally suited to. They might also say that their sacrifice wouldn't make any difference.
I would certainly like to have a really clear psychological explanation of how society and the media is able to so effectively brainwash so many people into believing that sending weapons to Israel whilst it is carrying out mass murder is somehow respectable whilst the pro-Palestine protest represent a threat to society. I think that the simple answer is that we are, to a very considerable extent, driven by the consequence of our conditioning combined with our perception of our interests and needs. Whilst most people abide by the norms of society, rationality and a strong commitment to principled ethics does not feature especially strongly in the thinking and lived behaviour of most people.
I don’t know if you have heard of the evolutionary biologist, the late Edward O. Wilson. Edward O. Wilson
I transcribed this from his short video statement on BigThink
(https://bigthink.com/hard-science/eo-wilson-what-makes-us-human-paleolithic-emotions-medieval-institutions-god-like-technology/)
“Modern humanity is distinguished by Palaeolithic emotions, Medieval institutions … and god-like technology. We’re a mixed up, and in many ways archaic species in transition. We are a chimera of evolution.”
In other words, we are a complete mess, and not well put together. This is why I have a job. I believe you have read my book Therapy Without A Therapist? There is a way to straighten the mess that we are in and most people are capable of achieving better brain functioning that correlates with maturity and with being ethical, empathetic and harmless to one another among other things.
Dear Avigail, thank you for such honest and painful talk. However, I would certainly make a difference between really mentally damaged person (psychopath) and subconscious compliance with the society's norms and customs. That was also a subject of Carl Jung's reflection when he was speaking about why Germans admired Nazism and went along with their ideology despite the horror that Nazism was inflicting on humanity.
For instance, even if we don't talk about why the majority supports and cheers on mass-extermination of human beings, we can look at how children are being raised. That a mother sees her child as a continuation of her own body and therefore, a subject to her will. Authoritarian oppressive parenting is being encouraged in many societies. Some societies even deny the child any will at all, including marriage, education and interests. But that does not mean psychopathy. It is a tradition. In the USSR, the tradition was to expect obedience and submission from a child. People believed that punishment and aggressive disapproval will prevent the child from repeating mistakes. In Israel, everyone believes that there is eternal hatred of Jews in the world and that they must be strong and never have any humanitarian considerations, otherwise they will be all annihilated. Golda Meir said something in this direction: "I do not want Jews to be humanitarian, leftist, compassionate... and dead". I am not sure that it can be classified as psychopathy. They are simply raised believing that if they don't kill - they will be killed, if they don't torture and rape - they will be the victims instead, if they don't show their power of destruction, people will stop being afraid of them and will kill the Jews again... I apologize for this unclear comment, perhaps you see what I mean...
Thank you Lena and everything you say is true. I have written something about this elsewhere, including in the previous essay. In this one I meant to focus on the issue that ‘ordinary’ people who are non-psychopaths, as in their brains are perfectly fine, enable leaders/managers/people in power who are diagnosable. When things go pear-shaped ordinary people then blame the psychopaths for all the ills of society instead of looking at what they are contributing to in their jobs, and everyday life. So my point was that no psychopath can do anything on their own. They are enabled by ‘ordinary’ non-pathological people.
Having said that, anyone who is brutal to their children, or causes harm to others under whatever rationale, be it ‘social customs’, believing that it is ‘good for the child’s survival’ etc, should have something kick in in them that would stop them when they cause suffering. This regulating mechanism is in our prefrontal cortex (PFC).
As I explain in my previous essay, we are born with an adaptation that enables the limbic system to weaken, or completely shut down the prefrontal cortex, the moment we feel triggered into threat. Every human being alive would have experienced this at least once in their life, but more likely much more than once.
The problem with this mechanism is that as soon as we are under threat, we lose all our ‘higher’ human capacities, such as empathy, ability to think clearly, our sense of identity, our ability to regulate emotions and behaviour, ability to plan ahead, perspective, self-awareness, our concerns for the way we impact on others, and more. The integrative work we do in therapy prevents this from happening as we inceasingly integrate the limbic system (survival) with the prefrontal cortex. I believe you have my book Therapy Without A Therapist. It is all there.
The point is that ordinary people can do, or enable others to do a great deal of horrible stuff when they are triggered. Frightened people are dangerous, and they do not need to be psychopaths at all. Most human beings have a fully functional brain. But under threat, when they lose all the capacities, and abilities that make us human, they can become temporarily like psychopaths because their higher functions are shut down. What psychopathic leaders tell them would make sense to them in that state. About 50% of the population in relatively safe and healthy sections of society also have trauma, which predisposes the person to live almost permanently in a state of survival. It means their PFC is shut down a lot more of the time compared with people who do not have trauma. So anyone who inflicts trauma on children can cause generations of people who live in a permanent state of fear. As a former sufferer of trauma I know exactly what this feels like.
Psychopaths have a permanent impairment of the PFC. With non-psychopaths it would be temporary, only when the person feels under threat. But it’s no good to anyone if people directly commit, or enable atrocities, and then wake up to themselves after the harm was already done.
Having said that, you need to know that the Israeli soldiers committing the genocide in Gaza and the OWB are not ordinary infantry. They only have elite units in there, and it is for a good reason. Those so-called elite units, genuinely have a disproportionate number of diagnosable psychopaths among them. They are carefully selected for it. Israel knows that ordinary soldiers would find it hard to follow orders, which is why they have those ‘elite’ units there.
Thanks you for reading and the excellent comment, Lena.
BOTH!!!
Of course! I just want to encourage those who keep quiet and criticise the bad guys without recognising the responsibility that they themselves bear for the way things are. Thanks for reading. 🙏🏼
All of this, 100%, no notes.
Thank you for such generous feedback. 🙏🏼
The Mereological Fallacy?
"The question we are confronting is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. It calls for conceptual clarification, not for experimental investigation. One cannot investigate experimentally whether brains do or do not think, believe, guess, reason, form hypotheses, etc. until one knows what it would be for a brain to do so – that is, until we are clear about the meanings of these phrases and know what (if anything) counts as a brain’ s doing these things and what sort of evidence would support the ascription of such attributes to the brain. (One cannot look for the poles of the Earth until one knows what a pole is – that is, what the expression ‘pole’ means, and also what counts as finding a pole of the Earth. Otherwise, like Winnie-the-Pooh, one might embark on an expedition to the East Pole.) The moot question is: does it make sense to ascribe such attributes to the brain? Is there any such thing as a brain’ s thinking, believing, etc.? (Is there any such thing as the East Pole?)
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made a profound remark that bears directly on our concerns. ‘Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’ This epitomizes the conclusions we shall reach in our investigation. Stated with his customary terseness, it needs elaboration, and its ramifications need to be elucidated.
The point is not a factual one. It is not a matter of fact that only human beings and what behaves like human beings can be said to be the subject of these psychological predicates. If it were, then it might indeed be a discovery, recently made by neuroscientists, that brains too see and hear, think and believe, ask and answer questions, form hypotheses and make guesses on the basis of information. Such a discovery would, to be sure, show that it is not only of a human being and what behaves like a human being that one can say such things. This would be astonishing, and we should want to hear more. We should want to know what the evidence for this remarkable discovery was. But, of course, it is not like this. The ascription of psychological attributes to the brain is not warranted by a neuroscientific discovery which shows that, contrary to our previous convictions, brains do think and reason, just as we do ourselves. The neuroscientists, psychologists and cognitive scientists who adopt these forms of description have not done so as a result of observations which show that brains think and reason. Susan Savage-Rambaugh has produced striking evidence to show that bonobo chimpanzees, appropriately trained and taught, can ask and answer questions, can reason in a rudimentary fashion, give and obey orders and so on. The evidence lies in their behaviour – in what they do (including how they employ symbols) in their interactions with us. This was indeed very surprising. For no one thought that such abilities could be acquired by apes. But it would be absurd to think that the ascription of cognitive and cogitative attributes to the brain rests on comparable evidence. It would be absurd because we do not even know what would show that the brain has such attributes. Just compare the behavioural repertoire of a bonobo chimpanzee, a fortiori the behavioural repertoire of a human being, with that of a human brain.
Why, then, was this form of description, and the forms of explanation that are dependent upon it, adopted without argument or reflection? We suspect that the answer is: as a result of an unthinking adherence to a mutant form of Cartesianism. It was a characteristic feature of Cartesian dualism to ascribe psychological predicates to the mind, and only derivatively to the human being. Sherrington and his pupils Eccles and Penfield cleaved to a form of dualism in their reflections on the relationship between their neurological discoveries and human perceptual and cognitive capacities. Their successors rejected the dualism – quite rightly. But the predicates which dualists ascribed to the immaterial mind, the third generation of brain neuroscientists applied unreflectively to the brain instead. It was no more than an apparently innocuous corollary of rejecting the two-substance dualism of Cartesianism in neuroscience. These scientists proceeded to explain human perceptual and cognitive powers and their exercise by reference to the brain’ s exercise of its cognitive and perceptual abilities.
It is our contention that this application of psychological predicates to the brain makes no sense."
~ Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 2022, Wiley Blackwell.
I am not sure what you are commenting on but thank you for taking the time.
I'm commenting on what appears to be a reductionist materialist explanation you seem to be offering for this psychopathy and how this ‘interpretation’ lacks conceptual clarity, which could cloud any sort of description of the problems you are trying to outline?
A few Examples:
"Psychopaths have an impaired executive, and also an impaired limbic brain. Unlike people with healthy brains, an impaired limbic system makes psychopaths unable to generate normal feelings in response to what goes on around them."
"Some psychopaths are born without the ability to develop a proper, fully human brain."
"Their brains might have trauma wired in, but their executive is intact, and so is their neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to wire and re-wire itself all through life."
Bennett and Hacker:
"Many brain-neuroscientists have an implicit belief in reductionism. Few try to articulate what exactly they mean by this term of art. Among those who do, the most lucid statement of the common conception of reductionism with respect to cognitive neuroscience that we have found is given by Francis Crick in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis. Indeed, one reductionist thesis that Crick defends is also what he holds to be the eponymous ‘astonishing hypothesis’: namely, that ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ It does not, Crick avers, ‘come easily to believe that I am the detailed behaviour of a set of nerve cells’, but in fact it is so. This conception appears to be a form of ontological reductionism, inasmuch as it holds that one kind of entity is, despite appearances to the contrary, actually no more than a structure of other kinds of entity. Side by side with the ontological reductionism, Crick also defends a form of explanatory reductionism: ‘The scientific belief is that our minds – the behaviour of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.’ The reductionist approach, Crick explains, is that
‘a complex system can be explained by the behaviour of its parts and their interactions with each other. For a system with many levels of activity, this process may have to be repeated more than once – that is, the behaviour of a particular part may have to be explained by the properties of its parts and their interactions. For example, to understand the brain we may need to know the many interactions of nerve cells with each other; in addition, the behaviour of each nerve cell may need explanation in terms of the ions and molecules of which it is composed.’
Reductionism, Crick holds, is ‘the main theoretical method that has driven the development of physics, chemistry and molecular biology. It is largely responsible for the spectacular developments of modern science. It is the only way to proceed until and unless we are confronted with strong experimental evidence that demands we modify our attitude.' Colin Blakemore propounded a similar form of reductionism, with a more epiphenomenalist emphasis, in his BBC lectures The Mind Machine.
‘All our actions are products of our brains … We feel ourselves, usually, to be in control of our actions, but that feeling is itself a product of the brain, whose machinery has been designed, on the basis of its functional utility, by means of natural selection.We are machines, but machines so wonderfully sophisticated that no one should count it as an insult to be called such a machine. …
The sense of will is an invention of the brain. Like so much of what the brain does, the feeling of choice is a mental model – a plausible account of how we act, which tells us no more about how decisions are really taken in the brain than our perception of the world tells us about the computations involved in deriving it.’
Such assertions as these – namely, that human beings are machines, or that the behaviour of a human being is no more than the behaviour of their nerve cells, or that decisions are taken in and (apparently) by the brain – are not science but metaphysics. Whether such venerable metaphysical pictures are rendered any more plausible by modern science than they were in antiquity by Democritus, Epicurus or Lucretius more than 2,000 years ago is of some interest. Precisely because the various forms of ontological and explanatory reductionism are metaphysical theses concerning the logic of existential attributions and the logical structures of explanation, they are not open to scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. If they are to be confirmed or confuted, then it will be by analytical argument.
In order to evaluate such reductionist claims, it is necessary first to clarify what reductionism is and what forms it may take. In the broadest sense, reductionism is the commitment to a single unifying explanation of a type of phenomenon. In this sense, Marxism advocates a reductive explanation of history, and psychoanalysis defends a reductive explanation of human behaviour. More specifically, reductionism in science is a commitment to the complete explanation of the nature and behaviour of entities of a given type in terms of the nature and behaviour of their constituents. The ideal of ‘unified science’, advocated by the Vienna Circle positivists in the 1920s and 1930s and adopted by the later logical empiricists in the 1950s, was committed to what has been called ‘classical reductionism’.
This conception held that the objects of which the world consists can be classified into hierarchies such that the objects at each level of classification are composed of objects comprising a lower level. The lowest level was conceived to be constituted by the elementary particles investigated by fundamental physics. Above this, in successive levels, are atoms, molecules, cells, multicellular organisms and social groups. Investigating each level is the task of a given science (or sciences) the purpose of which is to discover the laws that describe the behaviour of entities of the kind in question. The reductivist programme is to derive the laws of any given level from the different laws describing the behaviour of entities at the lower level. Derivational reduction, thus conceived, requires, in addition to the laws at the reduced and reducing levels, bridge principles identifying the kinds of objects at the reduced level with specific structures of objects comprising the reducing level.
Reductionism, in its classical form, was a bold and sweeping thesis about ontology and about the logical character of scientific explanation. It was an eminently philosophical thesis, driven by two primary considerations. The first was the apparently successful reduction, in a few domains of science, of fragments of one science to elements of another. So, for example, the interactions between stuffs of various kinds is successfully explained in terms of the atomic and valency theories of chemistry. The second was a deep commitment to metaphysical materialism, which is an ontological doctrine typically propounded in opposition to Cartesian dualism. In its simplest and warranted form, it amounts to a denial that there are mental or spiritual substances. In its simplest and crudest form, it involves the claim that everything that exists is material. In this form, it claims that the mind is the brain (hence the proliferation in recent years, in the wake of Noam Chomsky, of the misconceived phrase ‘the mind/brain’).
In less simple and crude form, it is the claim that mental states, events and processes are in fact neural states, events and processes, that mental attributes are in fact identical with neural ones.
Ontological materialism has little to be said for it. Denial that there are mental or spiritual substances does not imply that the only things that exist are material objects (and material stuffs). For evidently laws and legal systems, numbers and theorems, games and plays, are neither material objects nor stuffs. Indeed, the colours, lengths and weights of material objects, not to mention their capacities and dispositions, are not themselves material things, although it makes perfectly good sense to speak of there being such properties as colours, lengths and weights, and such dispositions as solubility and elasticity. More importantly, wars, revolutions and cultures, performances of plays, birthday parties and funerals, are not material objects – but there are such things, they occur, happen, or exist at a time or for a time.
One might modify the claim: everything there is, one might suggest, is made of, or consists of, matter. But this is just as misconceived, since laws and legal systems, numbers and theorems, games and plays, political parties, a society and its culture, inflation and economic growth, are not made of matter and do not consist of matter. Moreover, denial that there are immaterial substances does not imply that the only thing relevant to the explanation of the properties and/or behaviour of things that do exist – indeed, even of material things that exist – is the matter of which they are made. Organs and artefacts are explained primarily by reference to their function, not merely by reference to their material constitution. The behaviour of sentient creatures in general is explained partly in terms of their goals, and of human beings in particular also in terms of reasons and motives, not in terms of the material of which they consist. Even more obviously, the explanation of events and processes such as Hannibal’ s victory at Cannae, or the decline of the Roman Empire, the Industrial Revolution or the rise of Romanticism has nothing to do with the matter of which the explananda are made, since they are not made of anything.”
I hope this clears up any confusion as to what I am attempting to bring to your attention?