More of the same, now with more sameness! in Normal entries

Typing out the kinks. Again.
I think it was Borges on the subject of blindness who said “People ask me if it’s like darkness. No. Darkness would be seeing a color or range of color. It’s nothingness, I see nothing.” I’m probably paraphrasing seeing how I’m not 100 percent on who said it, but I’ve read a lot of Borges and it sounds like him.

I watch a lot of American movies too. They like using a sociopath as the protagonist or, more often, the antagonist. It lets the writer and/or director have the character do extreme things without having to explain much or need motivation. It’s a narrow way of looking at sociopathy; it’s not a darkness of empathy, it’s a nothingness of association.

The online living OED defines sociopath as A person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior. Uniqueness is an antisocial “attitude”, there’s a shitload of them and we all have experienced most of them once or twice, I mean manifested them in ourselves. With uniqueness alone American culture is primarily anti-social. We emphasize the strength and weakness of the individual as opposed to, say, their value to the community, and even when discussing their value to the community it’s because of their strength and weakness and not because of their integration as a part of the greater whole of the community.

What I’m sort of getting at is the number of sociopaths who aren’t criminals. By the OED definition only manifesting the attitudes makes them a sociopath. Without trying to be funny or make a political statement, Donald Trump certainly fits that definition. One of the anti-social thinking disorders that is also a diagnosis all on its own (unlike uniqueness) is narcissism. Objectively and using only observation, Donald Trump is clearly narcissistic. Also, some of your favorite people are too. You feel differently about them than you do Donald Trump.

The DSM V, of course, is a bit more specific in the definition and diagnosis of a sociopath. I’m working out kinks in left ulnar nerve, not writing a fucking thesis so I’m not going to give the multi-page version of personality disorders and sociopathy, but I will cut and paste the first sentence and the first criteria. They label A through Z (though I don’t think they go to Z)

A. Significant impairments in self (identity or self-direction) and interpersonal (empathy or intimacy) functioning.

So, that’s what I’m thinking about on a snowy Thursday afternoon in early March, 2018. We think of empathy as kin to emotion, something we feel. Fuck it, OED again; The ability to understand and share the feelings of another. The sharing part is what I mean by kin to emotion. We see someone acting on an emotion and, having felt it before ourselves, we share the feeling the way a method actor brings up his personal history to act out the emotion of a fictional character.

Understanding, however, is different. Intellectually we can be familiar with a feeling and recognize the behavior of someone else as being sourced from an emotional state. Sociopaths can do this well, better than you and me, well, better than me at least. It’s easy to simulate emotions with the intellect, it’s damn near impossible to simulate intelligence with the emotions. That’s how sociopaths can manage to live twenty, thirty, forty years or their whole life without being “discovered”. Even then, only the ones who commit crimes and are caught even make the statistics.

What’s scary to the community about a sociopath is the indifference to others, the suffering or keen and mew of other humans. Indifference is a lot different trip than malice though.

My own personal experience is with depression. Like a blind person seeing darkness, most people mistake clinical depression as some sort of overwhelming sadness. It’s not. It’s nothingness. It’s a lack of desire for anything. Not just lack of desire for joyful things, it’s not giving a shit about anything, not a lack of appetite, for instance, just an indifference to taste. What makes it so paralyzing though is that you know what having desire is, you know what it was like to be happy or sad or hungry or full or horney or sated. You can’t force yourself to feel, though you can mimic how you used to express the feeling. What you do care about is that you don’t care about shit. In a singular way it’s a bit like sociopathy, except it’s temporary, kind of.

I never felt homicidal in the throes of depression. Oh. Yeah. I didn’t feel desire at all and homicide is definitely a desire. And sure, there was some suicide ideation, but the indifference is much stronger. You kind of have to give a shit to kill yourself or be angry enough at someone else who’d be hurt by your suicide. Honestly it felt like too much fucking work and I couldn’t work up the maudlin effort to do it. I imagine there’s a lot of sociopaths who feel that way about, say, homicide. If you really don’t care about others what the point in offing one? Ego gratification? Perhaps, sure makes for a neat story line (Neat as in tidy not as in keen).

Aw, shit. Between Donald Trump and then me I kind of lost the thread. I’d be pissed if I was doing something more than working out the kinks in my nerve. Perhaps it’s just a distraction. I’m pretending it’s like physical therapy — working the muscles the nerve affects, but mostly it just keeps me from fixating on the weirdness in my arm. Christ, this entry makes me sound bat shit crazy, you know, like you, respectively, y’all.

One day I’ll look back on this and … delete it.