Dan, Matt, Carl and all:
Matt said:
I don't see why "no way." [to the psychopathic brujo] I thought it was Pirsig's
point that we need a new, finer-grained understanding of insanity to understand
how the extra-ordinary appears by the very fact of its extraness to be outside
of reality, which for most is simply "the ordinary." I wasn't intending to
get into the nitty-gritty of an ethico-psychological discussion, about which I
do not have any expertise. I was simply taking Carl's definition of the
psychopath for granted ("A psychopath experiences a break with reality") and
transposing Pirsig's understanding of insanity onto it, and discussing it in
terms of the conversation about praise/blame, intention, and moral
responsibility I had generated from the remarks you and Steve exchanged. ...
dmb says:
This is actually pretty complicated stuff and it reaches into very different
areas of thinking such as politics, sociology, criminal justice, psychology,
religion and mysticism. I guess it shows that morality is not a small thing.
In any case, we only get a sketch of the Brujo's character but it's enough to
safely say, I think, that he was not psychopathic, psychotic or insane. He was
a very naughty priest, at least from the point of view of a traditionalist or
small "c" conservative. It seems that he is something like a local, tribal
version of our more famous contrarians. You know, like John Brown, Lincoln,
Ghandi - or if you want to get really epic - like Jesus and Buddha. Two of our
culture's central heros, Jesus and Socrates, were, convicted criminals who were
sentenced to death by a "proper" court. Sad fact of history is that heads roll
as revolutions unfold and milder forms of cultural change will usually result
in cuts and bruises, losses and gains, etc.. But this is not psychosis or
self-serving criminality. There are hard cases, like John Brown. That one is
debatable. But we can also plainly see that Ted Bundy and Charlie Manson just
can't be compared to Lincoln even though the latter is in s
ome sense responsible for more deaths. The motives and aims are so entirely
different that it's not hard to tell, you know? Why was that Brujo peeping into
windows? Was he just a sexual deviant looking for some flesh or was he seeking
somebody's unguarded truth. It makes all the difference, you know?
Matt continued:
..I wasn't inquiring into whether Carl's definition was right, nor intending to
suggest different medical treatment for them. But according to a distinction
between a "psychopath" and a "sociopath" that Carl supplied, the first was
operating in a different reality and the second was operating in _our normal_
ethical reality, just with no care for doing what that normal ethical reality
calls for. The tricky part in dealing with psychopaths, on this understanding,
is the tricky part in dealing with brujos or any potential Dynamic advance:
they could be Dynamic Quality or they could be degeneracy. It's hard to tell
in the present, as opposed to in the future looking back at the past. As you
say, "even though they both break the rules, it's a whole different deal."
It's just that knowing which deal it is can be difficult, and Pirsig seems to
say that there are no assured methods for telling which kind of deal it is.
Maybe you disagree with that, but I can't help but think t
hat doing so would violate some of the advances Pirsig did intend to make in
the philosophy of insanity.
dmb says:
I think we probably have the terms in proper order by now. Like Dan said, "A
psychopath isn't suffering from delusions. I believe Carl is thinking of a
psychotic. A big difference between the two is that a psychotic person can be
treated with drugs while there is no way to make a psychopath care about
others." The fact that they can blend in and appear normal is one of the
scariest things about psychopaths. He's a heartless predator with a big smile
and a nice haircut. A maybe he's your representative in Congress or the CEO of
the company in which you invested all your stock. But a psychotic dude can be
spotted from a mile away. He's the one talking to his grocery cart, the one
that scares the other homeless dudes, who are just traumatized addicts and
such. The interesting thing about insanity and its connection to Dynamic
Quality is a religious and mystical claim, I think, and not so much about
contrarians or social change or criminal justice. I mean, the connection is
that
the two states of mind resemble each other, so much so that "mystical
experience" and "psychotic episode" are something like two names for the same
thing, two ways to judge the same event. In both cases you are outside the
mythos, although I would imagine that the latter is much more painful.
I'm skeptical about Jungian psychology, especially after taking a couple of
classes. And yet I don't know of a better way to think about psychosis and Jung
himself was able to completely cure about one third of his psychotic patients.
Another third got better to some extent and the final third were apparently
beyond help. As you likely know, a psychotic person basically operates on the
basis of his unconscious mind. It's like they act out their dreams while awake
in the daytime and then at night when they're asleep they pay the bills and do
the shopping. And if you're a Jungian then the unconscious mind is a giant pool
of archetypes and myths and meaningful symbols, all of which operates with a
strange logic of its own, as you know all too well from your own dream life.
Psychotics dream out loud, and usually that dream isn't dreamy at all. It's a
real nightmare. Interestingly, Pirsig reports that he identified with the myth
of Orpheus during his experience. I don't know why e
xactly, but that makes a lot of sense to me. I have no way to justify this
Jungian thinking except that it seems to explain things like Pirsig's report.
He was delusion from a common sense perspective, but if you see it as a healing
process in which he was working out some really basic conflicts in his "soul",
if you will, then you see that identifying with Orpheus was a sweet and awesome
means to become who he did in fact become. Here we are singing his songs, you
know? I think this is what he was talking about when he said that sometime
psychotics come out "better than cured".
Haven't seen Sherlock or Monk, but I guess Dexter is something like them.
Dexter is a serial killer who's incapable of guilt or remorse, but he lives by
a code. He only kills other serial killers - and he just so happens to be a
blood-splatter specialist in the homicide division of the Miami Police Dept.
It's great fun, as you can image. It's not for kids. The fascinating thing is
the number of people that he has fooled, including his wife and sister. Like I
said, that's the scary thing about psychopaths. They know how to be polite and
charming. They know how to blend in.
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org/md/archives.html
