Most people are fundamentally decent. Most would rather love and be loved than hate and be hated. Most would rather nurture and build things than destroy. Most would recoil, as Hume suggested, from stepping on their neighbor’s gouty toes. This is true of most Americans and non-Americans, Republicans and Democrats, Christians, Muslims, atheists, Jews, others, and nones.
Despite being fundamentally decent, we are also pretty easily knocked off course into doing wrong. Lots of different things can do that: ignorance, defensiveness, near-sightedness, insecurity, fear, and so on. Although we are skilled at silencing it to maintain our comfort, the vast majority of us have a conscience that pokes at us when we do wrong. Because we are fundamentally decent.
About five percent of the population, however, doesn’t have a conscience. They are the sociopaths and psychopaths among us. To conjure a pretty sociopath, think of Nicole Kidman in To Die For. At the extreme end of psychopathy, there’s Jeffrey Dahmer. Sociopaths can put on the clothes of decency, but it’s just a shell they (sometimes) put on to get along. I should emphasize, nobody chooses to be a sociopath. They can no more acquire a conscience than the rest of us can get rid of ours.
For the third installment of what I guess is now officially a (short) series of OPs, I’d like to dig into decency, indecency, and sociopathy. The series is about “What kind of society and polity do we want for ourselves and our countries?” The first two installments are here and here. As with the previous two OPs, I ask folks to assiduously avoid discussing current events and personalities. Specifically:
I want to encourage: Discussion about shared values and not-shared values; discussion in the abstract about political structures; discussion about how systems design can help or hinder us from creating the kind of society we want to live in.
I want to discourage: Discussion about current events; any mention at all of the current or previous President of the United States; any comments about any current political party. In short, anything that can knock us off the abstract game and into tribal warfare.
If you want to discuss current events, parties, and personalities, there’s always Breaking News.
. . . .
I’m going to go way out on a limb (/s) and say I want a decent society. A society in which people treat each other with respect at a minimum, and compassion and kindness for the most part. Whether we hold political leaders to that same standard is a bit trickier. To some extent, political leaders set the tone for a society; on the other hand, politics is rough sport. It occurred to me some 20 years ago, Americans want a sociopath in the Oval Office. Someone who–for example–will make our gasoline cheap, even if that means pursuing blatantly immoral policies. We want someone who will do what we would be ashamed to do. At the same time, sociopaths can do a heck of a lot of damage, especially when they are in positions of power.
It seems to me some level of immorality in our leaders is inevitable. But I’d like there to be a line. I want leaders who don’t disparage whole populations. I want leaders who maintain and reinforce an ethic of civility. I want leaders who are working toward a world in which human rights are respected and an increasing share of the world can live in material security.
I also think most people are not well-educated about sociopathy, and not well-equipped to recognize it and understand the difference between people acting immorally because of human frailty vs. people acting immorally because they are inherently amoral (i.e., sociopathic). Nor do we as a society have a coherent strategy for limiting the damage sociopaths can do. I’ve read about a program–I think it was in Wisconsin or Minnesota–that had some success helping criminal sociopathic teens become non-criminal sociopathic teens. I can’t come up with it right now.
Questions for discussion:
- Anyone want to make a case for an indecent society–i.e., where respect, compassion, and kindness are not important norms?
- What role (if any) should political leaders play in reinforcing those norms?
- Would it be helpful for the general public to become more educated about sociopathy and psychopathy? Are there potential downsides to that?
- Do we really want sociopathic Presidents (or Prime Ministers)? If so, what can be done to channel their behavior in ways that benefit society and don’t cause too much damage?
- Is a distinction between being decent in politicians’ personal lives and decent in their public lives meaningful in this context?