Tag: empathy

Evil as mental illness- the short version

If you tell someone that they are inherently evil, that because of the way their brain works they will inevitably do evil things, you’ve removed their motivation to try to be good by telling them it’s impossible.

If you tell someone that only people with inherently evil brains can do truly evil things, and that this someone, in contrast, has a normal, healthy brain and is thus good, you’ve removed their motivation to try to be good by telling them it’s unnecessary.

If you frame “doing bad things” as a curable mental illness instead of an inherent one, that’s a lot more plausible, but it still means importing all the stigma and baggage people have about mental illness into every criticism of someone’s actions, which is only going to make it harder for people to admit they’ve done something wrong.

Come to think of it…

Not only is spontaneous empathy not necessary to make moral decisions and be a good person, in fact, the majority of morality is learning how to treat people well even when you don’t have empathy for them.

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This is just one example, and it’s very Christian, because that’s how I was raised, but:

The story of the good Samaritan: When you see someone who might be in trouble, and instead of thinking “Oh, that poor person! I’ll help them!” you think “Ew.” … you should still help them.

We tend to think of this as teaching people to have more empathy, but I don’t think that’s what it is. No matter how many times you train your subconscious to stop going “ew” at a particular group of people, there are always more people out there who you’re going to feel that way about. What we need to teach people, ideally, is to even try to care in the first place. To reconsider their gut reaction. To not assume that who they happen to feel empathy for is an accurate guide to who deserves their regard. To make a habit of thinking “What if I should care?” when their subconscious doesn’t care.

The Lieutenant Leary series and sociopathy

Or, Why do I care about Tovera?

Tovera is completely unique in my experience.

Usually, when a fictional character is labelled in canon as a sociopath (or a psychopath, or sometimes schizophrenia gets the same treatment), they might as well be called a demon instead. The effective meaning of the word sociopath– the way it’s commonly used– is a person who does evil things for no reason. It lets authors import Sauron-style inherent and implacable evil into a non-fantasy setting. It creates a character whose actions don’t have to be explained, because they are, by (unofficial) definition, outside of human reason.

I wouldn’t really have a problem with that, if they’d just go ahead and say “demon” or “evil”– if people didn’t use the word sociopath this way, and then also believe that sociopathy is a medical diagnosis, a real condition that a person could actually have. “This character is evil for no reason” is an acceptable conceit in a piece of fiction, where many things are simplified and we’re asked to suspend disbelief. It’s not a depiction of any real person. People have reasons for the things that they do, even if they aren’t good reasons, and evil is not a medical condition.

I’m afraid that that may be the hardest point to accept in this whole thing, but it’s the most important one: Evil is not a biological characteristic. It is not a fundamental property of certain people’s brains. No one is congenitally predestined to be evil.

Mental illnesses and cognitive disabilities can certainly be a factor in why people make bad decisions or do harmful things (along with a million other factors.) Where we go wrong when it comes to “sociopathy” and its relatives is in thinking that mental illness and evil are one and the same thing. That mental illness inevitably makes people evil, or that every evil person must be mentally ill, or that true, deep evil comes from mental illness and nothing a sane person could do is really as serious.

This specter of mental illness as evil is very, very common in fiction of all kinds, and also in mostly-nonfiction based on actual criminals. These ideas pop up in people’s minds whenever there’s a high-profile crime. Ordinary people, talking casually about mass murderers, call them “crazy” and “depraved” and “sick,” and news outlets positively rush to suggest in all seriousness that such criminals are mentally ill. (At least when they’re white. Otherwise the “terrorist” or “thug” angles may win out.)

Tovera is unique, and David Drake is unique, because when he writes that Tovera is a sociopath, he doesn’t mean that she’s evil for no reason.

Instead of being an implacable evil, completely unaffected by anything, she’s well aware that her mind works differently from most people’s, and she feels vulnerable because of it. She wants to fit into society, but she doesn’t know how to. From her reaction to Adele and what she says about her former employer, it seems that in the past, people who’ve realized that she’s different have either found her disgusting, or tried to take advantage of her and use her as a tool. The most compelling line, to me, is something she says to Adele near the end of the book–

“I told Markos [Tovera’s former employer] you were too dangerous to use the way he tried to,” Tovera said musingly. “He didn’t believe me. He didn’t think I could know anything about people.”

Tovera has spent a long time in the power of someone who thought she was barely human. She depended on him, not just for practical things like her paycheck, but for the entirety of her sense of direction and purpose in a world she feels lost in. He told her she couldn’t understand people, even when she thought she did, and she at least partly believed him. That she would have so little confidence in herself that she put Markos’ judgment of her abilities above her own shows just how inadequate and vulnerable she feels without someone to guide her.

All in all, Tovera behaves like an actual person with a disability, not like a caricature of a villain. It seems to me that David Drake isn’t exactly sure what it is that Tovera lacks– “conscience,” “empathy,” and “understanding of social norms” aren’t exactly the same thing, after all– or how he wants to define “sociopathy,” but whatever it is it’s still a cut above defining it as an uncontrollable urge to murder people in inventive ways.

I also like the fairly explicit parallel between Tovera and Adele, and to a lesser extent between Tovera and Daniel in the later books. Rather than being contrasted against the main characters, as an example of evil or disease, Tovera and her explicit label of “sociopath” serve to point out just how little empathy Adele and Daniel often show, and how easy it would be to argue that they deserve the same label.

They are all willing to resort to as much violence as is necessary to protect themselves and accomplish their goals. They all react to violence and danger calmly, whether as victims or as perpetrators. Daniel and Adele have had to learn to do that in order to survive. They’ve both lived through situations where panicking or freezing in the face of danger would only put them in more danger.

Labelling a character as a sociopath generally means the audience is supposed to view them as inhuman. When David Drake labels Tovera as a sociopath, and then shows her vulnerability and her similarity to the main characters, he affirms Tovera’s humanity and theirs, and that of everyone who has done cruel things to stay alive.

I keep telling myself I should write about empathy/mirroring/relating to other people, but I don’t know where to start. I don’t really have a framework for understanding any of it myself– I can’t find anyone else who’s written much about it. Apparently even “hyperempathy”, the simplest and easiest-to-pin-down idea that I’ve got right now, isn’t really a widely recognized thing. Argh.

I was going to try to write more, but I’m tired. I guess I can just do a bunch of short stories of weird things, like the “stuff about my sexuality” posts.

More about What Distant Deeps

I should say something about Tovera, since I was having opinions about empathy earlier. This isn’t the first time she shows up, but I think it’s the most detailed of the little narrator-introductions we’ve gotten for her so far:

“If you follow your training, you have less to think about and so make fewer mistakes,” said Tovera in a primly chiding tone. She accpeted Adele’s ethical decisions without question: Tovera had no conscience,  but her sharp intelligence let her act within the bounds of society so long as she had a guide she trusted to tell her what those bounds were.

Tovera did not, however, defer to Adele’s judgments regarding doctrine and technique, except under orders. She ws apt to honor even direct orders in the breach if she decided they would endanger her mistress unduly.

That wasn’t simply a matter of loyalty, though perhaps it was that as well. Tovera knew that she wouldn’t survive in society without direction. She had been the tool of a Fifth Bureau officer. After he was killed, she had attached herself to Adele as someone who would appreciate the usefulness of a murderous sociopath the way she appreciated the postol in her tunic pocket. Either would kill at Adele’s direction, and Adele’s duties and ruthlessness guaranteed that she was likely to need them.

Tovera hasn’t really done much in the story yet, but I’m cautiously positive about her. I feel like this neat explanation of her only works because it’s pretty fuzzy about exactly what “conscience” and “ethics” and “social boundaries” are, and I’m not sure how much sense it actually makes.

(It’s also pretty contrary to the usual pop psychology about this kind of thing, which is really surprising, don’t you usually hear “sociopaths/psychopaths are socially smooth, good at acting, good at manipulating people”?)

But it treats “sociopathy”/”having a conscience” and a person’s actual conscious desires and choices as separate things, and I’m in favor of that.

Empathy

As it turns out, I have a whole lot of feelings about this whole “scary dangerous people who lack empathy!” thing.

First, to be clear. I don’t feel like I’m at all lacking in empathy myself. This isn’t personal for me in that way.

But I have really strong feelings about how people act like “lacking empathy” (in whatever sense) makes people evil/dangerous/criminal.

The bottom line for me is this: I cannot accept a system of thought in which evil is inherent to certain people.

I can’t. People cannot be biologically determined from birth to be evil. Evil is a choice. Everyone can try to treat people well, and no one is exempt from having to try.

My other quick response goes like this: Oh, sure, because typical empathy totally makes all of us who have it kind, nonviolent people. It totally stops us from knowingly and callously hurting each other, from deciding certain people’s pain isn’t worth caring about, from stealing and cheating and thinking it’s justified.

Are you fucking joking?

Being capable of of spontaneous, visceral empathy for others doesn’t mean we actually have it all that often. It certainly doesn’t mean that it pops up to stop us every time we might hurt or upset someone. Normal people with perfectly functional, normal empathy are assholes to each other all the fucking time.

We decide (or absorb from society, or are explicitly taught) not to empathize with certain people, all the time. Lack of empathy leads people to do terrible things, absolutely. But (the overwhelming majority of the time, at least) it isn’t a complete, innate lack, it comes from all the dehumanizing beliefs we have about each other. It’s about the belief that “those people don’t matter,” in all its forms.

In order to treat people decently, everyone has to make a conscious effort, every day, to fight those things. Occasionally having spontaneous, visceral empathy does not make us superior. It does not make us exempt. I cannot stress this enough. It does not make us exempt from working to understand and respect people.

And lacking empathy, or struggling with it, or having to consciously puzzle out how someone might be feeling instead of understanding intuitively, does not make anyone inherently incapable of treating people well.