A recent thread on teen suicide instigator Michelle Carter resurrected some troubling questions that have confounded me for years.
I have long been fascinated with concepts of good and bad, or if you prefer, good and evil. This curiosity dates back to childhood, where I often found myself arguing religious principles with grown folks.
Yeah, I was that kid.
Books like M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie and The Road Less Travelled would become part of my haphazard search for answers. People of the Lie posits that evil is a psychological condition, the hallmark of which is non-stop, pervasive lying.
This lying then provides the necessary cover for evil to work its evil magic. See, evil apparently needs this cover, because when it presents too overtly, it (hopefully) gets socially sanctioned. It gets thwarted.
The overriding layperson view from our Jezzies was that Michelle Carter is a sociopath. Which is kind of like a scientific way of saying, “Oh yeah...she’s evil.” Sociopaths and the like cause a disproportionate and extreme level of heartache for their fellow life travelers.
Me being me, I then wonder: Where is that imaginary line, that line that separates a Michelle Carter from a garden variety teenaged mean girl?
The one that distinguishes a sociopath from just an asshole?
Here’s an exchange from the thread. A poster who works in mental health discusses a childhood bully of hers who ended up killing herself:
Sometimes I wonder if the school would have taken action- maybe told her father what she was doing, then maybe she (her bully) would have gotten some help. I was put right into therapy. I still, even though I have worked for years in mental health, cannot understand just how cruel children can be to one another- and that is why I steer way fucking clear of working with adolescents. Fuck no.
I ask: “Do adolescents just grow out of this, or is it more they figure out they can’t just indulge their lizard brain instincts and survive in the world for long?In other words...do they become better people, or just more calculating people?”
I think the ability to edit what one says out loud is stronger, we’re more self-aware or know how to deal with our own insecurities, anger, and so forth. I think the ones that don’t grow out of it are weeded out of social circles pretty quick. I would think most just grow out of it. I want to say, or hope, that few just don’t “indulge their lizard brain instincts” (love that, btw) anymore even if the same nasty, cruel shit is running around within their brain.
All of which makes sense, and is not especially comforting. Stark reality rarely is.
If people don’t want to grow and evolve into better humans, then bad behavior must necessarily get sneakier. It will need to become coded, to fly under the radar.
Let’s go full Debbie Downer with it, then.
Suppose the dominant culture at large also doesn’t want to grow and evolve. What if that culture just wants to drop all this pesky “do gooder” pretense, and really let the sociopathy fly?
