From Red Flag to Red Line: What Is the Limit?

Johnny Boy being a mook.

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I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), in which Robert DeNiro plays a low-life psychopathic mafia parasite, Johnny Boy, who is coddled and protected by his friend Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel, past the point where any sane person would’ve broken Johnny Boy’s legs purely out of principle. For those who haven’t seen the film and don’t want to, here’s the plot summary: low-level mobster doesn’t pay his boss, doesn’t do anything of substance for the next couple weeks, then gets shot in the neck after telling said boss to his face that he’s a sucker who’s easy to rip off, and no, he’s not going to pay him. Charlie, the actual main character, repeatedly makes excuses for Johnny Boy, vouching for him, spotting him a few dollars here and there, and believing he can get him to get his act together. After Johnny Boy’s final confrontation with their mutual boss, Charlie tries to get Johnny Boy out of town until things cool down. It’s while making their getaway that Johnny Boy gets shot in the neck, flailing around like a stuck pig, and Charlie gets shot in the arm. Roll credits.

In media and in real life, we have all seen examples of wives, children, parents, and siblings stick by a relative after he is accused or convicted of a serious crime—or exposed for a noncriminal act that severely violates behavioral norms.

The way I understand this phenomenon is twofold. First, there is just the general tendency of family to stick together no matter what. I’ve never had to help a close friend or family member “bury a body,” figuratively or literally. Never having had this particular type of experience, I can’t speak to how real or common it is. But I think I can imagine the motivation.

Second, there is the dark personality’s ability to cultivate loyalty among family members who aren’t targeted as scapegoats or prey. These members only ever see the facade, and so if there is ever a revelation about the dark personality’s true nature, they simply cannot believe it and will act as defenders. I guess this is a combination of both factors, a blending of familial solidarity and cultivated loyalty to a persona that doesn’t actually exist.

I’m sure there are some who hold to this kind of loyalty as a personal virtue or inescapable duty. And I can imagine situations where it is appropriate. Let’s say you are falsely accused of a horrific crime. If that ever happens to me, I would be relieved if my friends and family stuck with me even if the accusation caused them to experience some degree of doubt over my guilt or innocence. And even if I could understand if they would turn on me (for instance, if the evidence were fabricated in such a way as to appear definitive), I would still feel disappointed and betrayed that they believed my accusers over me.

To take another scenario, I personally wouldn’t judge the entire family of a notorious high-functioning predatory pedophile for throwing him to the wolves. But I would probably write a sarcastic and derisive tweet about a family that did the same to an innocent man who was falsely accused of such—say, by an actual high-functioning predatory pedophile. Think of all the people who have cut out family members for their stance on Covid, or for being conservative. I’d say such people have a pathological deficit of familial feeling.

Family sticks together, no matter what.

So at what point, if any, should a family member turn on one of his own?

My preliminary thoughts are as follows: If the family member himself is the victim of the other’s predation, I think that is sufficient justification to cut them off and denounce them. Same goes for a situation in which this is done out of solidarity with another family member, like a sibling. But I’m willing to give a pass to close family members of the accused in situations where they are not the direct victims. Think of this as a kind of “innocent by virtue of consanguinity” principle—an extreme version of giving the benefit of the doubt. But even if there is no doubt, I can still understand the tendency. In other words, I don’t expect family members of dark personalities to set themselves in opposition to their kin. And I don’t blame them for falling under their spell if they have been subject to the psychopath’s persona-building for their entire lives.

But how far should this allowance go? At what point is it just too much? And at what social scale?

For me the red line is psychopathy. Anything else can be forgiven, but psychopaths don’t deserve your familial support. They don’t have the hardware even to appreciate it. You’re just a tool to them.

In some of the above examples, the solidarity shown to a psychopathic family member is not virtuous. Rather, it is an example of what Lobaczewski calls a para-appropriate, or maladaptive, response. This is when a psychopath elicits an otherwise normal tendency from someone for their own ends, and often to the detriment of that person. Psychopaths are experts at eliciting sympathy, for example, but this is just a manipulation tactic in order to protect themselves from exposure and retribution.

As for social scale, think of a church congregation. If one of their own—a priest or parishioner—is accused or exposed, at what point should the church expel them from their midst and denounce them as the spawn of satan? What about members of one’s religion or race in general? How far must one’s own team, as a collective, go before enough is enough and you’re justified in saying, “fuck these people, I want nothing to do with them”?

The reason I ask is because for some there is seemingly no limit. This can approach absurd limits, and it’s why Lobaczewski called the inability to call a spade a spade “the first criterion of ponerogenesis” (not so coincidentally, the subject of my first Substack post, written precisely 3 years ago):

This can take different forms. Members of a group can sometimes hypnotize themselves into believing that they can do no wrong, have never in fact done anything wrong, and are always innocent victims. Anything and everything they do is justified. When this belief is maintained, it creates the conditions for unlimited evil. It also necessitates coercing others into believing it and enforcing it with an iron fist, because any break in the narrative would be catastrophic for the group in question, both via the resulting mass personal neurosis brought on by disillusionment and the inevitable backlash from the actual victims. This is the height of both mental illness (when one actually comes to believe it) and pathological egotism (when one doesn’t necessarily believe it, but forces others to do so). Any actual violations of basic decency are reframed as justified and in fact moral (conversive thinking and paramoralism), and any denunciations of group members’ excessive and inhuman acts are themselves denounced as vile calumnies (DARVO). This is a typical pathocratic mindset.

This form shades into another: fully accepting the facts, and embracing them. Under this particular mind virus murderers, gang members, rapists, and petty career criminals are valorized and sanctified. We can see this in the microcosm of women who become sexually obsessed with mass shooters and serial killers. Or political movements that seem to deliberately choose the lowest forms of humanity to turn into icons. There must be some type of conversive thinking that produces this anomaly, but I do not understand it. If any reader has an anecdote to share, please do so. When confronted with the facts about the person in question, do their admirers simply deny those facts? Do they say they don’t matter? Do they say they were justified? All of the above?

Avoiding either of the above scenarios requires having relatively well-defined standards. If you like someone, or a group of someones, it’s very easy to move your goalposts of acceptable behavior with every progressive violation of civility. The salami-slice theory of moral acceptability. Each slice may cause some minor twang of conscience (not quite rising to the level of a twinge), but it is easily accepted as the new normal, until the next slice, repeated until the whole sausage is sliced to pieces and you’re making excuses for the most heinous displays of inhuman predation imaginable.

Having standards requires a certain amount of disagreeableness—a willingness to look around at the insanity of the crowd and say, “Yes, you are all wrong, and no, it does not bother me to say so.”

This is not even to mention the same dynamics on a geopolitical level. The realpolitik school accepts current alliances and rivalries at face value and proceeds accordingly. This inevitably results in double standards, where allies’ abuses are excused or denied and rivals’ are exaggerated or manufactured. But how far can an ally go before a nation can’t help but call them out? Should they? Or is the alliance an end in itself, as long as they stay out of our business? But how likely is that, really—that a nation or collection of nations who otherwise demonstrate a parasitical or otherwise psychopathic tendency would stay out of our business? Maybe there should be standards to geopolitical alliances too, and consequences for violating those standards. That’s probably easier said than done, but I hope to find the answers to all my questions in the comments section.