Saturday, March 30, 2013

Electing Sociopaths


Ohio Senator Rob Portman’s change of heart on gay marriage does in fact represent an admirable degree of open-mindedness, but why did it take him so long? (turns out he knew his son was gay and never mentioned it while he was being considered as a VP candidate) Of course I don’t know him, and it might be a tad presumptuous of me to speculate, but hey, that’s what we do here.

Here’s what I suspect of most Republicans and how Portman’s new perspective seems so representative of it:  prior to his son’s coming out, Portman, like many Republicans, was convinced he knew better than anyone else.  He was sure that being gay was just wrong, morally, legally, fundamentally wrong.  In his mind, prior to his son’s announcement, Portman’s beliefs had very little to do with anyone other than Rob Portman.  If your life didn’t look like his life, you were probably wrong. 

That probably sounds worse than it is, after all, we can only see the world through our own eyes and compare it to our own experience.  But at some point we have to grow up and accept the fact that just as we can ONLY see the world through our own eyes, every other individual in the world can only see it through his or her own eyes as well.  No one has our same experience nor do we have the exact same experience as anyone else.  In Senator Portman’s case, prior to his son’s epiphany, he apparently never considered that someone else’s experience might actually lead to a different perspective than the one he held.  Until it affected him personally, it was not an experience he was capable of or willing to accept or consider. I think it’s safe to say Dick Cheney’s experience was similar.  Ditto Mark Sanford whose Appalachian Trail lie covered up the kind of sin that he so loudly protested before he got caught.  That is, until it affected him personally, before it became part of his own experience. 

The problem as I see it is in this “growing up” part of the equation.  As mentioned, we all see the world from our own limited perspective, but as adults seeking to function in the larger world, we have the burden of acknowledging other perspectives exist, and accepting they may even have as much merit as our own.  I know this argument won’t convince some people that gay marriage should exist, but it is an argument far more basic than that.  It’s called empathy, and when adults don’t have it, we generally consider them sociopaths.  Even worse, adults who can’t or won’t (and what’s the difference?) acknowledge the merit of different ideas purposefully limit their own ability and experience in the world. They limit what contributions they make to the world and they limit what they can get from the world.  If you can’t imagine a world other than your own, it’s as if you’re admitting you are incapable of solving any problem that you personally have never encountered.  It’s closing yourself off to creativity or new ideas or discoveries.  After all, these things were not part of the past you experienced, and you won’t consider ideas, thoughts, concepts that aren’t already part of your past experience.  You have basically reduced yourself to a drone, plodding along, marching toward your own death.  No wonder so few Republicans are atheists!  I’d want to believe in an afterlife too if that’s how I lived this one.

This issue isn’t just an abstraction either.  In concrete terms, the inability to imagine a life other than our own plays out on a tactical level.  It’s hard to imagine that the ability to afford a car and insurance payment makes me richer than most of the people in the world.  (According to the CIA Factbook,  the worldwide average annual income is around $5500.) For even lower middle class Americans, this is simply unfathomable.  We can’t begin to imagine what that kind of life might be like.  So folks who cannot acknowledge something like that can’t possibly understand why those folks might not see college as a viable or even desirable option.  Folks who can only relate to their own experience fail to understand why these people can’t just pick themselves up by their bootstraps and build a business and end up millionaires because, after all, America is the land of opportunity. 

It’s hard for even lower middle class Americans to imagine growing up in a bad neighborhood where getting killed or going to prison before your 18th birthday is 10 times more likely than graduating from high school.  For too many of us, such a life simply doesn’t exist, except, maybe, for people who CHOOSE to live it for some unknown reason.  When you can’t imagine those circumstances then you can’t understand why those people also don’t see college as an option..because baic survivial takes up all their philosophical thought time.  And when you can’t see that, you naturally blame them for the circumstances surrounding them.  You wonder, often aloud, why can’t these people just work harder and make something of themselves?  Wouldn’t they feel more self-respect from a minimum wage job than from public assistance?  You can’t imagine that some kind of public healthcare for their kids (since for-profit healthcare is neither affordable nor available to folks with minimum wage jobs) might be more important to them than their own self respect or resume building.

If you didn’t grow up in a town where everyone worked in the mill, or the steel plant, or the auto factory, or the farm, standing, using their hands and backs, heavy lifting, hard work, long days, for generations, where it has long been instilled that “real work” makes you sore and tired at the end of the day, then you probably can’t understand why the idea of a desk job NEVER factored in to their post high school plans, and thus you can’t possibly empathize with the fact that they simply don’t know where to turn now that the farm is a golf course, the mill, factory, plant have been moved to China or somewhere where worker safety and environmental stewardship have yet to figure into the cost of doing business.

Even if you worked in a clean, safe, well-lit American factory, you probably can’t understand why workers elsewhere might believe their ability to unite is a matter of life and death, rather than just whining for a raise (because whining for a raise is the only idea in your experience).

Until something happens to you personally, you can’t seem to wrap your brain around it.  It’s kind of childish or at least immature.  So forgive me for not celebrating Senator Portman’s sudden enlightenment.  My question remains:  if a person hasn’t matured enough to be able to consider the perspectives of others, what makes them think they’re capable of leading others?  And if people who lack empathy are considered sociopaths, then how are they even eligible for and how do they keep winning elections to public office?

Luth,
Out.