"Instincted" to Death: When Forgiveness Fails

Josh Slocum recently had me on his show, Disaffected, to talk about forgiveness and what Josh calls “forgiveness discourse.”

To Bring the Sword

Josh made the observation that the call for the victim to forgive the perpetrator is often stronger than the call for the perpetrator to repent or for him to face justice. Sometimes there isn’t even an acknowledgement that the perpetrator had done any wrong to begin with; it is simply elided or presumed as a given. The important thing, in this discourse, is that the victim publicly acknowledge that he has forgiven—often framed in terms of it being for his own health and mental well-being, because all those negative emotions are unhealthy.

I told Josh that this is an example of a para-appropriate response. As some background, here’s what Lobaczewski writes in Logocracy:

The presence of a phylogenetically derived and hereditarily transmitted instinctive substratum of mental life is a phenomenon common to all animal species and to man. The content of this substratum, as a product of many thousands of years of phylogenesis, is characteristic for a given species. The instinctive substratum of the human being is a set of emotionally colored inborn reactions formed in the species, which has lived in a social setting since its prehistory. This substratum inspires activities necessary for the development of human personality. We carry within us basic responses of a social nature, which contain generations of social wisdom and errors. For this reason, human personality cannot develop normally outside of a suitable human environment. It must absorb cognitive content from other people in various ways in order to transform it into its own personality. It also cannot find the meaning of life outside of human society and its bonds.

But as a product of the species’ phylogenesis, no instinctive substratum can be perfect in its responses. It fails particularly dangerously in situations that, due to their apparent similarity to certain stimuli, trigger reactions encoded in our instincts as para-appropriate (or maladaptive) responses. Such responses lead animals, their packs and swarms, to extinction.

In the notes for Political Ponerology, I gave my now standard example: sympathy farming. If you simply pretend to be a victim, you can gain sympathy that can then be exploited, as Ted Bundy did by wearing a fake cast. The sympathy garnered is a para-appropriate response because of the surface-level similarity to stimuli for which it would otherwise be appropriate to demonstrate compassion, but which in this case lead to death. All manipulations and cons are the purposeful elicitations of para-appropriate responses.

I argue that forgiveness discourse is similar. Our instinct is coded with certain tendencies for navigating and maintaining relationships. Even among normal individuals, we suffer small to large betrayals or slights. In these situations, it is normal to forgive. I do something that royally aggrieves someone close to me, they let me know their displeasure, and I attempt to make amends. We all screw up. We all act like assholes every once in a while. And unless we dig in our heels and let our natural egotism rule the show, we all know what it’s like to feel shame and guilt over such minor sins. Sometimes, if the offense is large enough, we do not expect forgiveness and end up making great efforts to atone for what we have done. In the case of a family dispute, we might not speak for years, but when it is possible, the relationship can be mended and we let bygones be bygones. We never would have been able to survive as a species without the ability to mend relationships and reap the benefits of continued cooperation.

If, however, we see someone refuse to accept the apology and genuine signs of remorse and repentance from the aggrieving party, we might see that friend as immature, unforgiving, and unreasonable. We might even rate their refusal to forgive as a worse offense than the one that prompted it in the first place. We call it things like “making a mountain out of a molehill,” and I’m sure we’ve all had someone in our lives who holds a grudge for way too long, becoming angry, resentful, and spiteful. This is the proper place for forgiveness discourse: when a normal person is behaving unreasonably in response to another normal person’s thoughtlessness and genuine remorse, to their own detriment.

However, our natural responses become meaningless when they encounter circumstances for which they were not designed. Sympathy was not designed for the Ted Bundys of the world. And neither was forgiveness discourse. Mark Bisone recently commented on this:

Here is what I think is going on when someone engages in forgiveness discourse. They have never, as Mark put it, “encountered the kind of evil that seems unforgivable.” As Josh and I discussed, most people are not aware of psychopathy. Some who are aware, refuse to believe in it. Everyone is fundamentally the same, and thus redeemable—the one-size-fits-all anthropology. So, when someone like this encounters a situation involving a person who is constitutionally incapable of feeling remorse, who is outside the category of redemption, and who will never repent, something short circuits in their mind.

Their immediate reaction in this situation is to default to normal social dynamics. Blocking out the anomaly from their consciousness, they only “see” what they perceive as a lack of forgiveness on the part of the aggrieved. (And they may not even be correct. The person may simply be expressing the depth of the harm done to them. As this, too, is outside the boundaries of their experience, they misinterpret it.) So they respond as if the aggrieved party were the one behaving unreasonably. As Lobaczewski would put it, their thinking becomes “conversive,” blocking out and substituting information that makes them feel uncomfortable, either because it is outside their frame of reference, or because acknowledging it would challenge their current beliefs about the allegedly universal nature of man.

On some mostly unconscious level, the person is aware that they are dealing with an anomaly. This anomaly provokes discomfort, as the existence evil does and should. And since the anomaly is outside their ability to control, they latch onto the most available target. It’s more likely that they will be able to get the aggrieved party to forgive—and thus stop the uncomfortable display of “negativity”—than they will be able to get the offender to reform. And since conversive thinking is usually accompanied by conversive morality, they end up blaming the victim.

This process could not occur without one of two things: 1) ignorance of the existence and features of psychopathy and 2) egotistical refusal to accept this reality.

But all that is from the perspective of an outside observer. When it comes to the victim, I would argue that for them to think in the traditional category of forgiveness is equally inappropriate. Psychopathic abusers fall outside of its proper scope. Just as they are incapable of remorse, they are not even capable of forgiving.

Abused children and the adult victims of psychopathic crime are in the unenviable position of experiencing a kind of violation that we are not born to deal with. It takes time, measured in years or decades, to come to terms with it and to become immune to it. Lobaczewski recommends taking the approach of a naturalist, seeing the psychopath as a type of predator in the wild, like a vampire bat or shark. They can’t do other than what they do, and it is a waste of energy to be angry at them for simply being what they are. What matters is to understand them, avoid them if possible, and take what actions are necessary to protect yourself and those around you. If a rabid dog is on the loose biting people, it is necessary to remove it from the community and put it down. There’s no need to be hysterical about it, especially on the part of those taking the necessary action.

It doesn’t make sense to “forgive” a psychopath in the way we would forgive a normal person. What we can do is come to understand them and the effect they have had on us. In Lobaczewski’s experience as a clinical psychologist, just doing this had a remarkable healing effect for his clients. It also tempered any violent, vengeful feelings they may have been harboring. Perhaps this is actually a form of forgiveness, with understanding and forgiveness being two sides of the same coin.

That said, Lobaczewski advocated a form of mass forgiveness for the communist pathocrats on the part of the society of normal people. Like a post-war amnesty, such an act was practical as a means of convincing the pathocrats to leave power, assured that they could do so safely as opposed to digging in their heels and initiating a new wave of repressions in order to avoid the inevitable public lynchings. However, despite advocating for this forgiveness, he also wrote: “Keep in mind also that understanding and forgiveness do not exclude correction of conditions and taking prophylactic measures.” This included punishment reserved for the worst crimes committed.

What may better apply here is mercy. As Mark writes, mercy can only be granted from a position of strength. And in some circumstances, it may be a mercy to imprison a psychopath for life in lieu of execution, or alternately, to execute him in lieu of life imprisonment. For those who have not committed any serious crimes worthy of such measures, Lobaczewski suggested this:

The prerequisite for the creation and successful operation of such a [logocratic] system is to understand people with various mental anomalies, to treat them with understanding care—at the price of certain restrictions placed upon them and abandonment of their dreams of power. This should ensure the basic social order and should be facilitated by reliable knowledge, its proper dissemination, and appropriate social and state institutions.

But such mercy is only possible if one of logocracy’s main principles is put into practice: “that the power on which the fate of other people depends should always rest in the hands of normal people.” That is not currently the case.

As a final comment, Lobaczewski was a Catholic. He saw great wisdom in Christianity’s teaching of forgiveness, and his scientific approach echoed the words of Jesus Christ: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” For Lobaczewski, forgiveness was justified as deriving from “a recognition of the psychological causation governing a person while committing evil,” i.e., understanding ponerogenesis.

But as he noted just above, this form of forgiveness is not without teeth. To quote another saying from the Gospels: “If your brother sins against you, rebuke him; and if he repents, forgive him.” Forgiveness discourse often leave out the rebuking, and it does so to everyone’s detriment.

Modern societies, horrified by the abuses of law in the era of World War II and by totalitarian regimes, are moving towards humanizing the law and replacing criminal law with rehabilitation law. Currently, this breeds a lack of fear of the severity of the law, which is exploited by common criminals and organized political terrorists.

Lobaczewski had his own thoughts on how to correct that, but that’s another topic.