[FRIAM] Trump as a victim

Wed Oct 7 13:51:45 EDT 2020

“shaped”, steve.  It was shaped.  You know what “shaped” means.  Nobody knows what “informed” means, in that usage.  

And if you ever use “incredibly” to mean “very” or “incredible” to mean good, I will come after you with pitchforks.  Somebody said on a podcast that the NYTimes had some incredible reporters.  In an age in which credibility is the central issue of our time, we do not want to fudge its meaning. 

n

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 10:34 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim

Marcus Daniels wrote:

Once one practices modulating a class of these feelings it changes how or even if one experiences them.    Having empathy can just be another form of being reactive which is not a good way for adults to be IMO.  It is equally reactive to be enraged every time Trump or Trumpers are on TV.    They dehumanized themselves.

I believe that suppressing one's pity/sympathy/empathy/compassion entirely is the "reactive" mode...   I suspect our friend Donald started down that path at a very young age and has only the barest echoes or ghosts of those feelings remaining.    I knew too many "western men" as a child who seemed to have done the same with their relationship to nature and animals...  being brutal with predators/varmints leading to a certain brutality to prey (game animals) to their own working stock (cattle, sheep, rabbits, horses, dogs) and then ultimately their families (wives, children) and could-have-been friends.   They were not devoid of this, but there was something about the lifestyle and circumstance (and social context) that seemed to strongly encourage, if not require, that suppression of empathy.

As a teen I was faced with a looming conscription to go to Vietnam and "kill some gooks" (sorry for the patently non-PC framing, but it captures at least half of the image of the time) as well as being faced with letting that happen and returning to the other half of the country shouting "baby killer" in my face.   I *knew* that these were not my only two choices, but it forced (opportuned?) me to consider what I had to lose if I let my own country (and most of it's citizens) inject me (like a pinball) into that pinball game of "no good choices".  What I had to lose was my empathy, as underformed and possibly even maladapted as it was at 14 or 16 or 18 years old.    

I am not willing to treat empathy as nothing more than an "emotional reaction", though I acknowledge that it is informed (sorry Nick, I can't help using that idiom) by a deep emotional experience.    Perhaps Empathy is to Pity as Justice is to Revenge...   most of the Right might think this is splitting hairs, and perhaps they have swayed the Left into the same perspective?  Everyone's loss.

- Steve

From: Friam  <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> 
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 9:07 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'  <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim

Glen, 

I don't think of empathy as something that you gin up; it either happens to you, or it doesn't.  And then you decide what you want to do with your empathy.  As a child, perhaps,, did you ever read any of Ernest Thompson Seton's (no relative) Lives of the Hunted?  The wolf, terror of the Corrumpaw (?), wily killer of sheep, evader of traps, lies before you in a cage, wounded and helpless.  You feel empathy.  And so you kill it.  Anybody who tells you that you should feel empathy lacks empathy for your lack of empathy.  I WILL feel empathy for Trump when he's tried.   I dread those trials.  In fact, even watching him twist and lie and twist and lie, watching him contort, makes me queasy inside, like  watching a man tortured.  But empathy, like rage, is just another emotion, and needs, like all emotions, to be tempered with reason.  

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> 

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 6:54 AM
To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Trump as a victim

A collection of people, who shall remain nameless, recently tried to shame me for objecting to their waste of empathy for poor lil ol Trump, in light of his infection. One argument went something like "His father was horrible." One primary argument went something like "empathy begets empathy". Empathy is not zero-sum. Etc.

I started my objection to all this Trump-as-a-victim talk by listing several aspects of his CHARMED LIFE, like the fact that he's lucky enough to have lived to a ripe old age (when so many of us die young), he was born wealthy (when so many of us live our entire lives dirt poor), his stupid TV show was wildly successful (when so many of us are serial failures), his weaponized litigousness has benefited him throughout his life (when so many of us can't even afford a lawyer). Etc. 

All that *privilege* has been bestowed upon him. And it seems, to me, he's squandered it all. He reminds me of those pitiful pictures of Saddam Hussein in court and then prison and then dead. Oh boo-hoo, poor little dictator being mistreated. Such sentiments are not merely weird to me. If game theory and the success of simplistic tit-for-tat has taught us anything, it is that the algorithmic *depth* required to beat straightforward (poetic) "justice" is academically interesting, but pragmatically degenerate.

So, no. I will not waste any of my finite lifetime feeling sorry for poor lil ol Trump, our Privilege Squanderer in Chief. If that magically limits my ability to empathize in some other context, so be it. If it implies that when I die pathetically, under some bridge, eating partial hamburgers from the Wendy's dumpster, my colleagues *rightly* avoid wasting their finite lifetimes feeling sorry for me, then I'm ready for that day. Like it or not, tu quoque is a fallacy.

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