Charismatic Sociopaths
An explanation for today’s Republican party
I watched Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey on Netflix yesterday and I want to revise some of the things I talked about in my article of a few days ago, There is a God and She is Science.
In it, I extolled the cannily evolutionary way humans have succeeded by forming communities and, by extension, societies; it is how we work together that we have succeeded so wildly in overcoming adversity in our environment.
This is a good thing, I went on to say, because we care for each other. “Tend and befriend” is a feminist take on evolution and furthermore, an optimistic one, because we can look our societal problems squarely in the eye and solve them with collective wisdom. It gives me faith.
It still does. But there is a caveat.
There are those who take advantage of our propensity toward community and society, and it is the urgent, requisite, necessity of our historical moment that we are aware of these charismatic assholes and that we banish them to a jail cell without outside means of communication as quickly as possible.
How we can detect and flush them out is for you to decide; I’m rather gullible, myself, and tend toward the follower in the leader: follower equation. I’m not the one to ask.
But here’s the rub: we seem to be producing those assholes in mass quantities as of late. What’s going on?
Let me tell you about a friend of mine. As you might know, up until recently, I worked at a nursing home, and she surprised me by becoming one of my good friends. She worked with me and was one of the most caring and compassionate people I’ve ever met.
At a nursing home, you tend to find two types of people as employees: those who take the job because they have no other skills, and those who take the job because they have a great deal of love for their fellow human beings and take the low paying, unforgiving work out of a sense of helping others.
I’m overgeneralizing, of course, but it’s an observation, and let’s go with it.
She was one of the latter, motivated by service to the elderly population in the home, the population who are there not because they’re so on top of things physically and mentally that they choose to live communally, but rather because they need help, and lots of it.
We got to talking one day and she told me about her very conservative views on abortion. She described her feelings: those poor babies. How could people kill babies!
I was taken aback. She was a Republican?
I thought, but didn’t say, “But you seem so compassionate!” Republicans, in my stereotypic view, are miserly, selfish people who only think of cutting taxes and keeping people living on the street because they judge them less worthy out of prejudice and spite. They hate people! They hate society! WTF!
Turns out my new friend was a Mormon. She had wanted ten children, she said, but when number seven was born with severe physical problems, she had to stop.
I still value her friendship, to this day. She is kind and considerate, one of the most genuinely good people I’ve ever met. It was an honor to get to know her.
But I abhor her politics, and she doesn’t even know it, because my strategy while working at the nursing home was to fly under the radar politically and personally. No one there knew that I was a pinko commie Unitarian bipolar lesbian. I was protective of my identity, for good reason. But that’s fodder for another article and another day.
What I’d like to bring up is her earnest love of community, of doing good for others, of forming tight bonds with the people around her without regard to personal gain.
During the time I’ve known her she has befriended the hardest cases in the home; driven thousands of miles to help her son, who was in acute crisis; traveled not because of personal need but rather the need to “be there” for her family when her father died; driven me to the airport numerous times at the ass-crack of dawn and offered me work many times. She genuinely cares.
So why the hell is she a Republican? She voted for Trump and still prays for him daily.
The connections to the Keep Sweet documentary are legion and obvious, of course.
She’s a good Mormon woman, dedicated to family and community, but often impossibly naïve. She tends not to question her place.
People are good to her, the church is good to her and to her family, and just because she fits into their neat categories of what constitutes a good person (white, married, cis-gendered and middle-class) it doesn’t mean, she might contend, that that church is systemically racist or sexist.
Those of us on the outside tend to question that point of view. It’s unfair to we outsiders to be excluded from the group.
We humans seem to have a propensity toward visualizing a good person, a person on the inside of the group, with certain features.
I’m not sure that propensity is inborn, whether it’s innate to exclude, but certainly we learn who is the “other,” who is dangerous and not like us, and we carry those prejudices around and sprinkle them willy-nilly into our interactions and decisions.
Collectively, this privileges those on the inside, and causes systemic sexism, racism, ableism, body shaming, etc., condemning of groups of all kinds. In its extreme manifestation “othering” is used as a justification for war and genocide.
Out pops the charismatic, sociopathic leader who takes advantage of these twin tendencies: our evolutionarily advantageous urge toward community, and our propensity toward exclusion. The leader vilifies the outsider, and the community jumps on board.
Haven’t you always wondered why ordinary Germans in WWII agreed to go to war with their neighbors, to sacrifice their very lives and those of millions of innocents? They did it out of a sense of doing good for their community.
Hence Trump, our homegrown would-be dictator, and his inexplicable hold on power, despite his personally abhorrent, cutthroat tendencies.
He appeals to my gentle, compassionate friend because she values her community and her place of service and sacrifice within it. Trump is a Republican, and Republicans are good because they don’t kill babies and stand for traditional values.
I wonder if the demise of Roe v Wade will cause the dissolution of the Republican party? Repugnant leaders might not be forgiven their sins if they no longer have the “murdered babies” on their side.
Values voters might begin to value something else and turn their collective eye on corruption and sedition.
But I’m just a dreamer.
