The problem of inhumanity
Then there is a cure for psychopathy. We aren’t up against a brick wall? The American Heritage Dictionary defines psychopathy as “Mental disorder, especially antisocial personality disorder.” Psychopath as “A person who engages repeatedly in criminal and antisocial behavior without remorse or empathy for those victimized.” Definitions that compartmentalize the subject into analysis and treatment by sources themselves compartmentalized into the mechanics of machinery. Denied and deprived of the one source that can heal: Integration that holds all together into one system. Integrity. Person.
The nature of Energy inseparable from Love inseparable from Logic. Inseparable – the first casualty of a made-up world of separation. That when it divides its practitioners into the tidy compartments beloved of organization and profession it proudly puts on display marionettes who couldn’t figure out the meaning of their performance if their not-lives depended on it. As Freud couldn’t figure out the source of the “bad thing” in human nature he de-natured by turning it into “science.” A farce of mistaken identity brought to “perfection” in the iron rule of scientific objectivity: thou shalt not be a whole person. Thou shalt not be subjective. Thou shalt not live, love, or feel. Thou shalt separate.
And what do we get? Heinrich Faust and Immanuel Rath. Products of arid academia, transformed by craving for Love in the flesh into groveling psychological mutants. Smeagol (Gollum), a life transformed physically into a hideous image of inhumanity by craving for Energy, Meaning, and Worth in a lifeless object. The inhumanity of nuclear holocaust. Habitat destruction. Mass extinction. What one would expect from doctor and patient both emotionally neutered. Frankenstein monsters.
Making it solvable
Psychopathy is a call for awakening to its meaning. That it’s a flaw – pathology. A sickness, and where it resides is in the psyche, the soul, of Sapiens. Which takes inquiry beyond appearances, beyond substitutes for ideas to the ideas themselves and to the Guidance it needs to find them. Beyond physics to metaphysics. So that we awaken to the Mind with which we think and let ourselves choose to find our real thoughts in Loving Relationship with Guidance. One day at a time, one step at a time. Until the last step and day breaks, we open our Mind to let in the sun and the darkness we, ourselves, put there is gone.
Yes, we’re accountable for the consequences of our acts. But not because we’re the cause when “life” on Earth is one grand manipulation. The proximate cause is our metaphysical Self’s manipulator. What we are accountable for, personifications of our ancestral Self, is our choice of guidance. Whether Guidance connected to the Conscience of Creation in Reality or manipulator, a mirror-image hallucination of separation and provocation in unreality. The reverse of the Conscience of Creation. To learn the difference and to learn what it takes to choose with character and integrity is why we’re here. The problem of psychopathy and its consequences is ours to solve. But once the right choice is freely made it becomes solvable.
Making it personal
Human-ape depends on competition for motivation. Psychopath or not, one thing is certain. It’s starved for Love and, if so, it wants to get it right. Sapiens can’t get it right and compete with the ideal motivating Creation — Relatability. But that doesn’t mean it can’t still compete if it challenges unrelatability. Hierarchy itself. By letting down the mistakes that are its defenses against Loving Friendship. That advertises strength not by anything will but by acceptance of humanity and its need for Guidance. To be led instead of mis-led. Spontaneously, not willfully. And if it’s possible to share Guidance with another to be open to it. To the moment when a passing thought, an idea of attachment instead of detachment, is revealed to contain the Force of Life itself. Like a single atom, storing energy with enough power to illuminate cities.
Whether psychopathy is treatable can only be personalized. Brought to the agent of change that can never be the corruption of compartmentalized. Split in two. Split into unrelatable parts by hierarchy at war with itself, divided and dividing. It can only be brought to the integrity of character that won’t let itself be divided. To be corrupted by hierarchy. Satisfying its captive audience with the sight of Church hierarchy in mitres and zucchettos, cassocks and chasubles, albs and stoles. Moving in studied procession about great halls adorned with portraits of timeless grandeur. In deference to body and time, icons of separation, embellishments of rule.
It can only be brought to the integrity of Character dedicated to putting itself back together. Unafraid to be wrong and make mistakes when that’s the point: to learn from them and to move on. To relate.
Beyond Sapiens’ reach
Wikipedia, the American Heritage Dictionary, Jung, Myers-Briggs, science – all spooning up channel markers but without instructions where to place them. Jared Diamond, Sean Carroll, and Yuval Harari, latter day Hobbeses and Rousseaus, Gibbons and Toynbees, providing the broad sweep of Sapiens’ happenstance with clues to how and why it veers this way and that. To where it may be headed: to collapse as Diamond suggests or to onward and upward with more amazement, as Harari suggests. Yet none so far able to do what story needs to be told.
To personalize it. To make it relatable. Marketable. When discerning patterns in the manipulations of unknown forces can only go so far in doing so without being able to tell the reader, “This is who is making this stuff happen. This is why they’re doing it.” Why they’re pulling in opposite directions and doing so through privileged access to Sapiens’ psyche, though in different ways. One peremptory, the other respectful; one manipulative, the other spontaneous; one unreliable – devious, boorish, and seductive, — the other reliable – straightforward, open, and honest; — one a play-actor feigning emotion from stage, the other a friend empathizing at your side.
A Course in Miracles doesn’t intrude on Sapiens’ responsibility for personalizing and telling its own story, but its author does respond to requests for help with understanding the Why, the how, and the who of things. Beyond its origins in the dream to its origins within the Mind and psyche-soul of the dreamer. So that psychology may tread where angels fear to tread: on the ground of a Reality without materiality. Of metaphysics without physics. A state of Mind where seeds from questions are planted, flower into meaning, and answers bloom with purpose. The essentials of story, grown with the integrity and feeling of character, by character, and for character. That will remain beyond Sapiens’ reach so long as it reaches for psychopathy instead.