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[Nabubrush]

There are a lot of people who aren't in jail who probably deserve it over somebody who steals some shit, but stealing shit is not ok. Not to get into some stoned seventh-grade sociology shit or anything, but stealing is not cool. I am not keeping anyone down. I am working for the things I get, and I pay at least my fair share of taxes. Do not steal my shit.

Also, if I am armed and you break into my house, I do not know you are just after my shit. You will get shot.

[wombat]

Sorry people, especially Ash.  I have been walking dogs for ridiculously rich people (and getting like $400 every two weeks) and it makes me think of this shit.  One person has a refrigerator bigger than my bed.

On the one hand I think people who have refrigerators bigger than your bed should be shot. On the other hand, then, there goes your $400.

[AugustWest]

I think the question should be how did you achieve your success (not you personally AD) and then what do you do with the resources your success has provided. 

Keith, I'd respectfully submit that what irritates you is not successful people but greedy, wasteful, unappreciative or oblivious people. There are plenty of poor people like that too.  These traits tend to become more obvious when you have the ability to flaunt your lifestyle. 

I don't think there's much correlation between material success and crap dudeness.  Crap dudeness is an equal opportunity employer.

[side_show]

I don't think there's much correlation between material success and crap dudeness.  Crap dudeness is an equal opportunity employer.

I agree that there are assholes of all social standings.  The thing I encounter among people of material success is a particular breed of asshole I find utterly intolerable:  the douche that has no true concept of human suffering because s/he has never experienced or witnessed it up close, who writes off the legitimate hurt and exploitation of others as invalid because s/he is so small minded as to be unable to imagine or empathize.  When I encounter someone like this I can't help but wish that s/he experiences abuse, mental illness, exploitation, or some other sort of suffering that will (in my fantasy) "teach him/her a lesson."  If the property of such a person gets stolen, I can't help but think such mistreatment, among others, is earned.  I don't wish suffering upon anyone, and I try not to enact it upon anyone either but there is a part of me that feels something is right with the world when arrogant empathetic fucks suffer until they either see the light or get ground into dust.

[littlefallsmets]

I think it is fair to say that if you have material success, your ability to act upon being an asshole and spreading that pain around is potentially much stronger even if you are equally as much of an asshole but powerless.

It's like how the flat tax SEEMS fair until you realize that you're taking away so much more marginal utility from the poor with your "fair" tax.

More money you get, more problems you can make with your innate dickishness.

A poor asshole can, what, punch a dude in the teeth because he's had one too many Natty Ices?

A rich asshole can lay off ten thousand people because he has decided two new yachts is just not enough this year, it's a five yacht kinda year.

[jay-ell]

smells, there is a definite appeal in the idea of karma, for sure. Not that I think you're saying that you think that's how it works exactly, but more like that's how it should work, perhaps?

I can't say I buy into it because it doesn't square with what I see in life, too many arrogant fucks getting shit they don't deserve, and too many good people getting kicked around through no fault of their own. But nobody gets what they deserve in life, and it's a lucky thing for us that we don't, because most of us would be a lot worse off if we did (that being the Christian perspective on it, at least, where we're all sinners and such).

Still, I get the whole schadenfreude thing (woo! spelled it right on the first go!). Some people never seem to learn how to care about other people because they never get hurt. Instead of fantasizing about them learning their lesson, though, I try to pity them for their lack of life experience and shortsightedness. Even if how I feel about them has no bearing on their lives it feels more charitable and helps keep me from feeling resentment and jealousy towards them. It takes a conscious effort, but when I don't make the effort it eats at me and makes me unhappy.

[pmcd9]

Still, I get the whole schadenfreude thing (woo! spelled it right on the first go!). Some people never seem to learn how to care about other people because they never get hurt.

You're talking about Ray.

[theinevitable]

Man, life is shitty enough without adopting a philosophy where some people "deserve" for you to be a dick to them.

[side_show]

Man, life is shitty enough without adopting a philosophy where some people "deserve" for you to be a dick to them.

Unfortunately I've encountered enough people who intentionally exploit children and the weak to know that such folks are what makes life shitty a lot of the time.  I've got a lot of kindness to give, and my work is all about doing that and finding ways of bringing the light into dark places.  My energy is for the majority of people I encounter - good people who may have made some bad choices.  My energy is not for the small portion of people I encounter who are irredeemable. 

I'm pretty okay with treating a guy who's got everything in life, who thinks it's okay to trick a girl with cognitive damage into sexual exploitation like the piece of shit he is. 

I'm okay with offering no respect to the mom who was totally unapologetic about making her developmentally delayed daughter sleep in animal excrement and urine until the girl wanted to kill herself. 

In both these examples, with a lot of work on the part of the victims, as well as on my part and those of the other great people I work with, these girls are doing okay today.  It's been my honour to be part of the healing process.  As for the people who caused their suffering?  I approached them like I do all people - assuming they are good people who have lost their grip.  In these two cases though I found them to not be good people.  To be people who did not own their mistakes and to be people who lack basic empathy.  I've found that there is a small portion of society which I encounter now and then that has no redeeming qualities.  Often they are highly intelligent and very good at getting away with deplorable things.  In the case of the mom I mention, I feel almost certain after a year of watching how she functions that she has anti-social personality disorder (formerly known as a psychopathic personality).   

I guess what I'm saying is that there is a handful of people out there who are basically monsters in my eyes.  People who bring nothing to the table and who's actions make them unfit in my view to be part of the society I want to live in.  And I'm all for driving them out of my circle.

[theinevitable]

Yes, I meant "based on their membership in some broad group."

People who are actively dicks to children deserve to be treated like shit. I don't know if i feel that way about property crimes.

[wombat]

It is one thing to shun people and another to put energy into actively being a dick to them, I think. 

Also one thing to, say, bring abusers to justice, and another to steal people's stuff people they have a big refrigerator.

And just wasting time hating people for their refrigerator hurts no one but yourself. So I think that Inev's original point still stands.

[wombat]

Don't worry Ash, we love you despite your big refrigerator. Hate the sin, love the sinner, right?

[side_show]

Yes - totally.  I'm not debating Inev's point, I was spurred by the discussion, and especially Keith's mention of the "people who are keeping you down" to branch off and talk about something related.  I guess what I mean is that a small cross section of truly horrible people seem to be able to conceal themselves and be comfortably functional within the upper and middle classes, and that these people are deserving of shunning, although (from my experience) they typically aren't.  Further to that, I think the universal order is working right when they get karmic retribution for being horrible.  

What I really struggle with is that there is an undercurrent of permissiveness within the tendency to "look the other way" to preserve one's own comfort.  Unfortunately, from my own experiences, that tendency is even stronger when there are ethnic and economic divisions thrown into the mix. That's what sickens me.  We have 84 unsolved cases of missing and murdered women in my province.  The unifying features that define these women is that they are predominantly aboriginal and poor.  There is a horrible lack of concern or interest from the broader community about these women.  I can't help but think it's because poor aboriginal women are viewed as "less than" in my city.  The response when the missing person is Caucasian and middle class is very, very different.  Instead, when an aboriginal woman from a low income neighbourhood goes missing, there is instantly a response that labels her as "other" through describing where she lives (a poor and therefore "bad" neighborhood), and often by slut-shaming her.  She is not describe as a daughter, mother, student - she is quickly packaged off as "one of those girls" and dismissed.   If these women were pretty and blond, they would be front page news.  There was a point when a local teenager named Sunshine Wood went missing, however the local media was all over covering a North Dakota woman named Dru Sjodin's disappearance.  It was this obvious contrast of the pretty blond girl (not even from the community or country) getting massive local media coverage, and the aboriginal local girl getting almost no coverage what so ever.  Dru's case has been solved and her murderer is in jail awaiting death.  Sunshine's case is unsolved, with not leads.  The thing is, the aboriginal community has been saying for years that something is very wrong here.  Many people within the community believe a serial killer is at work.  When the same thing occurred in BC (50+ aboriginal women going missing, years of outcry from the community ignored) it turned out to be just that:  Robert Pickton. There was a "task force" assigned to address this, which was created over a year ago, and so far... nothing.  

I am aboriginal, and at the time Sunshine went missing I was also poor, and also lived and continue to live in one of those neighbourhoods where one is presumed guilty by address alone.  I take this very personally.  While I absolutely agree that fridges and property crime have nothing to do with the problem, I always think it's important to talk about the things that divide us.  I don't think anyone posting here is blind to these divides or on the side of "looking the other way" at problems.  But I do think it is a problem, that there is an awful divide between the comfortable class and the poor that leads to real suffering.  Last week was a hard one for me.  What I didn't say in that post is that that girl looked so much like a girl I've helped support that I had to stare at that photo for quite a while, and then check in on a few things.  Thankfully she wasn't the girl I was thinking of, but I know that there are men who live comfortable lives who pick up children off the street, do horrible things to them and then go back to their nice homes like nothing happened.  The divide there between the advantaged and the disadvantaged is real and gut churning.  It's uck.  It's just so uck.  I have no words, just guttural noises and a lot of anger and passion towards prevention.  The only answer, I know, is to keep fighting the good fight.

[jay-ell]

It might be worth noting here that about 1% of the population fit the clinical definition of a psychopath (though the vast majority are not violent). If you know more than 100 people, odds are you know somebody without a capacity for empathy. It's quite possible, smells, that the people you describe were just born psychopaths and felt no remorse for their actions because they could not.

Should these people be shunned and punished? Or should we view them as we view the mentally ill (bipolar, clinically depressed, etc) and offer them support services to help them learn to lead a normal life?

Much of the support offered to autistic adults revolves around helping them learn to read body language and empathize with others, although those skills often do not come naturally to autistics. It seems like if we could/would identify psychopathy in children and teens, we might be able to offer some of those same supports to help psychopaths learn cognitive strategies to make up for their lack of empathy.

I'm no Pollyanna, I know that some people choose to do things that are wrong because they are selgiraffe, feel entitled, don't care who they hurt, etc. But I feel that since most times we can't know for sure whether a person is just selgiraffe and evil or sincerely mentally ill, it's our job as fellow humans to give them the benefit of the doubt. That' doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them accountable for their actions and try to help them learn how to behave like people, but it does mean that I think it's more helpful to do so with empathy (even if they show none) instead of resentment and hate.

This applies, by the way, to petty thieves and murderers as well as the super-rich who got that way by stepping on the heads of the less fortunate. (According to British journalist Jon Ronson, the incidence of psychopathy among CEOs worldwide is 4%.)

[side_show]

I believe in offering people with mentally illness treatment and support 100%.  We offer people so many facets of help and support where I work, and we work with people to find them the right support for them to thrive.  There's a lot of help out there and I've seen people who want to get better really thrive.  I've seen people back slide too, but with an earnest desire to be well and own their mistakes as hard won lessons.

The thing is, nothing requires someone to accept treatment or support unless they are caught doing something criminal enough to be forced into treatment, and even then the person can simply go through the motions without actually changing their behavior at all.   Convincing someone they have a problem, never mind that they need treatment can be an impossible task.

At one time, I certainly came from a place where I thought all people were redeemable.  Now I don't.  I've seen behavior that is unacceptable from people who have no desire to change.  I've seen that behavior harm others in permanent and deeply damaging ways.  I've seen such people be confronted with the harm they've done and seen them lie and explain away and refuse to take any responsibility.  I'm talking about two or three people out of hundreds I've worked with.  The things they've done, mixed with their total lack of ownership over them and lack of empathy to their victims has lead me to believe there is a handful of truly bad people out there.  Responding to such behavior with empathy just doesn't work because if validates a person who is behaving reprehensibly.  It also puts the empathizer into a position that is incredibly unhealthy for them.  Working with the children of such a person now I can tell you that a lot of the work being done is related to unlearning and de-normalizing their parent's behavior. 

As for the whole prevention piece, I do think that's key.  I think there's so little known about prevention of personality disorders that it's a hard thing to pin point, but worth exploring.  The mentorship program I run is all about finding ways to do that.  Each situation seems to have its own unique way of working itself out.  What I can say is that there's simply not enough prevention out there, and that most work is done in reacting to things once they've gone to shit.