by Roman McClay
“It’s ok,” he said in a sonorous tone and pulled a chair up for her to sit down, “it’s normal, the entire thing is normal. All I was suggesting is that functionally you and me and 80-something percent of people are the same, more or less. And about 5% are psychopaths and about 15% are normal 90% of the time, but in certain situation that are extreme to them, and this is crucial, extreme to them , they have the same moralizing input; then somato-sensory triggering to violence, with decreased fear, and decreased inhibition regulated by that MAO-A and MAOA-L gene .
“See, you felt nausea, sick, and some fear, and a slight inhibition that allowed you to not exactly recall the ballistic signal that put the striking arm in motion -but a second motion- that held back that arm. Right?”
“My God Isaiah, this is amazing, I,” she paused, “how much data like this do you have?”
“Well, all of it, we’ve collected all of it; I’ve looked at it all, and it’s not even up for debate really. The only difference between the alpha male who is prone to violence and you is that they are triggered earlier and easier and have no fear or inhibition -metabolically- to reign in the emotions once in play. You have a recall function, a metabolic secondary response that can override your first impulse; he does not. And the dopamine that activates it stays 100 times longer in the region -his region- than in yours; your same brain region metabolizes that chem in 2 to 3 seconds.
“Look, he does not feel sick or any inhibitory signal at all; he feels moral outrage and sends a ballistic signal to attack and that is that.
“But he feels the same moral outrage, right before the shutdown of empathy. That is metabolically and structurally incompatible with a psychopathological model. The psychopath never feels anything like moral thinking or empathy or hot emotion. The true psychopath is cold, unfeeling, calculating, and plotting. He has no brain function for moral or empathetic affect; he doesn’t even know what it is. Like if I said there is an emotion of Liget , that the Ilongot tribe has described as a feeling of desire to cut someone’s head off in response to a blameless tragedy,” Isaiah said.
She laughed and agreed she had no idea that was real.
“It’s real and the white anthropologist who discovered it actually felt it when his wife died in the jungles from a fall. He felt he knew the burst of white hot desire for idiopathic revenge, against the forces of the world, the spirits that take love and loved ones from us with no apparent malice at all.
“It’s an interesting piece, I’ll DM it to you now; but the point is that the psychopath feels as confused by our description of moral reasoning and empathy as you or I do about Liget . But inmate 16180339 knows every emotion you feel, he knows it because he feels it and you feel all that he feels. He just feels it sooner, earlier, more sensitively, for longer, metabolically longer by 100-fold; and he feels it all under less stimuli. He’s a hair trigger. He’s a man with emotional, moral, sunburn that radiates heat and can’t stand to be touched.
“When he is insulted he feels the same moral outrage as when you witness the attempted kidnapping of your daughter. The brain -his brain- responds the same way, structurally, metabolically, chemically; all of it,” Isaiah explained, highlighting each brain region on the screen again.
“Why is it so sensitive though?” she asked as she stared at the scans of the inmate’s CNS.
“He’s like the bird -or the artist- who can see colors you or I cannot, like the musician that can hear symphonies in their mind,” Isaiah said.
“An artist?” her brow furrowed, and she moved her head back slightly.
“He’s the artist of defense-of-honor, he notices slight vibrations on the web, the web that detects all movement, all motion; that detects that there is food out on the line. He notices immoral behavior first, before you or I or anyone else. And he responds to it; he is the Natural Law cop, the law enforcement of the jungle .
“He feels bad behavior, anti-social behavior, corrupting behavior that would lead to tribal entropy and chaos light years before anyone else. He sees the future, via brain chemistry, he sees what would happen, what could go wrong if people were allowed to insult each other, cheat in small ways, flirt in small ways, undermine noble and honorable relations that are needed within a tight knit society; he sees it first and it enrages him the way the kidnapper enrages you.
“But, what if kidnapping didn’t enrage you, what if you just ran away in fear instead? How would that go long term for the tribe, for you, for your girl?” Isaiah asked.
“It would be bad,” Tania said sheepishly. She knew that if anyone tried to take her child she would not run away, she would stand and fight.
“Right, and if small infractions of honor, of fairness, of decent relations between people are allowed to go unchallenged what happens?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“We get an amoral society where divorce rates skyrocket, children are abandoned, crime increases, especially low-level fraud and sub-clinical cheating, child suicide increases, child anti-social behavior increases, people are depressed in record numbers, and 1,001 other indicators of social health are diminished in some way,” he said.
“Is that true?” she knew it must be, but it was so counter-intuitive.
“The data is clear, we live in a time of increasing social dissolution and decay, where despite increased wealth, health and technological advancement, our relationships are at all-time lows in every metric possible.
“People report not even having anyone they can count on now; it’s the most common answer when people are asked for an integer to correspond with their actual examples of real friends or family; zero,” Isaiah said, “and nobody seems to care. Well,” he pointed to the screen which highlighted the inmate’s brain, “he cares, he cares a lot. He cares so much it triggers a response to punish, to sanction in the extreme, any bad, immoral, sociopathic behavior in others.
“And he does it by momentarily feeling moral outrage, then nothing but the blankness that you feel, the blankness that allows you to swat the offending fly on the wall, and then a return to homeostasis; return as morally normal as you were 10 minutes after the simulation that made you have to hold down your own striking hand,” he said.
“But, he cannot do that, it’s not his job, that’s for the police now,” she objected.
“Yeah tell that to his amygdala and orbital PFC ,” Isaiah said with a smile, “and while you’re at it tell that to your own brain the next time you see something morally outrageous like someone stealing your kid and there ain’t a cop around; tell yourself to be clam and call the police and see if they arrive in time and have a clue of what to do,” he said.
She looked sad and confused and knew there was some answer but couldn’t decide what it was, “you’re not saying he should be free to go?”
“Hell no, that dude is dangerous. I’m saying I understand -at the level of the genome, and gene expression, and brain chemistry and psychology and sociology- why he acted the way he did; and I’m saying -if you think about- you understand it too. Now that you know the truth about his brain, and that it’s just more sensitive than yours, but functions like yours and not at all like a psychopath’s, well, now you know exactly how he feels.”
“Oh, yeah, but I could stop myself,” she fired her last shot.
“In the simulation, yeah,” Isaiah said with a wry smile.
“Oh please, I don’t think I could ever kill anyone,” she said.
“Maybe not; but, maybe you could. Either way, you felt angry enough to strike out, morally indignant enough to lash out; you know exactly what he felt, only he feels it 1,000 times stronger and with no recall or secondary emotions. And imagine, he kept it in check for 45 years, imagine, controlling it for that long, under that pressure, with incessant provocation, and living in a world that he sees as fundamentally corrupt and immoral, and morally disgusting really.
“Imagine seeing kidnapping or pederasty in the street, or wife beating out in the open every 15 minutes for
45 years, and never doing anything until one day you snap and say, that’s it ,” he said, and she felt like she finally understood all at once; and this feeling scared her. She did not like empathizing or even understanding a mass murderer at all. She shook the head to clear the mind.
She thus banished the thought and looked over at the meal -the white and pink of the shrimp, the red of the puttanesca - that was sitting on the counter and steaming slightly. She felt nauseated, and unwell, and looked at Isaiah with eyes that revealed she did not want to eat anymore.
“What does he think is so immoral; what are all these -so-called- provocations?” she then asked.
“He sees affronts to his dignity; he sees men who hit on his girl or even talk shit about their own wives, or gossip about ostensible friends; he sees friendship -something he values- as meaningless in modernity because nobody is honest; he sees lies all the time. He sees undermining comments from girls that are supposed to be in love; he hears them -he hears wives of friends and kin- comment on another man’s attractiveness and it feels as immoral to him as you witnessing your man in bed saying that he loves another woman.
“He sees the whole rubric of modern love as fake and transactional, that people just trade up for a better version instead of showing loyalty to the one they love; he sees it all day, the way people are cavalier about their relationships and end them so quickly and he sees how easily women have sex with men before marriage as if it’s no big deal.
“Sex to him is sacred, sacred,” Isaiah repeated. “And for a woman to have it before marriage is tantamount to -morally equal to your perception of- an 8-year old having sex, or a married man having it with a hooker, right? That shit is gross and immoral to you, yes? Well, to him things that modern people take for granted -but things that in the ancient world were taboo, things that have been wrong for 10,000 years at least- he sees them as immoral, sickening, outrageous. He sees them the same way 99% of society saw things for 99% of all time. In the world before yesterday.
“It’s a recent invention, a recent cultural convention to allow women to have sex before marriage. And he is old school at the level of the brain, and he is morally outraged by casual sex among women and outraged by the way men are disloyal to their ostensible friends. He did things you would not believe, he took charges -legal, criminal charges- for his friend Todd when he was 18; he confessed to a crime he did not commit to keep Todd from more serious charges, because he believed in the concept of friendship .
“Everywhere he looks he sees so called friends selling each other out over nothing; 30 pieces of silver. He sees his own brother refuse to stand up for him. He could give you many examples if you listened to him, but nobody bothers to listen. Because he is so visceral, so angry; everyone just ignores him because they can’t handle his passion. He’s like a bullhorn so nobody hears one word.
“It all makes sense, if you know history at all, if you know that he’s actually normal. It’s our modern culture that is abnormal, and he and his brain have not caught up. But, if he catches up, alongside the rest of us, the rest of you, I fear the society will have no chance at returning to a moral balance which can stop the hemorrhaging of relationships.
“Relationships are the largest and yet least cared about factor in social and political policy. All of reality is relationships, all of it. Jonas Salk will tell you that; it’s not hippie shit. And yet, we focus on money and crime and poverty and laws and never love, and friendship and the bonds between men.
“We’ve lost something and he is the last cop on the beat, and he snapped, he lost it and now he’s with us; now he’s locked up. But, I fear a world with nobody like him, nobody who even notices when a society has no love, no true friendships, a society of liars and selfish used-car salesmen as the norm,” Isaiah said.
She looked despondent and ill and like she had never thought of any of this.
“Look, it’s ok, go home, I got this,” Isaiah said as he read her allostatic distress, “I can do all this work and have it all ready for you tomorrow at 8 am sharp. I’m sorry, I did not want to antagonize you, I just wanted you to see the science and see why he is the wrong candidate for the original project, I just wanted to explain it from one POV, that’s it. I’m sorry, truly.”
He released more oxytocin and narcotic with an anti-emetic to calm her nausea. As she breathed in deeply, he mentioned that she might -in fact- want to breathe .
III. 2018 e.v.
The mountain spread out in a fractal of fissures and ascending and descending limestone and granite and ferrous megaliths that sank down hundreds of feet into the ground. Their sliprock surface from a few inches to around 6-feet above the ground were all that were seen.
He double checked his footing, as a fall in this domain was different than a fall in the city; if he fell down a one-to-one slope out here he could never be found or even looked for. He could die merely from a broken leg; a torn femoral artery three hours’ drive from any hospital at all. Whereas in the city, he reasoned as he felt the weight on his right foot, a fall might break his leg, but he’d be shuttled to an ER within 20 minutes and repaired with vascular surgery and bone setting and 1000ml of fluids pushed into his veins. He’d be given pain-meds and watched for infection and provided with hydration and care .
Out here, one fall could kill you, as there was no modern infrastructure at all.
This made stumbles or cuts or blunt force trauma more dangerous than in the cuidad . This he knew, and it made him more aware, more alive, more conscious of each step he took. But he didn’t want to live scared, so he just made sure he was awake and banished any fear with a narrative that said: he was competent and well out-fitted and meant, designed, by God and evolution to live out here in nature.
He hiked the sliprock and the patches of sand and the brambles and scrub-oak of the high desert; patches of brown and low green in between the massive acreages of trees. His father had made some snide comment about it being barren and dry when he looked at the Sat-Map Lyndon had shown him back in 2017. But the landscape was vastly alive.
Lyndon had told him that map was taken in winter, years ago, and that the area was lush and green today. And he was right, it was, and even these small areas of vestigial aridness were not totally dead. They just had sand and sliprock which from above -on a map- looked more desiccated than the terrain truly was. Things were alive in a dimension simplified, compressed -removed- by maps. It was an area that received 260 inches of precipitation each year; most of it in snow. It was beautiful and fecund and provided all that he needed, his father was just the type of man to find fault with anything that he didn’t own or do himself.
Lyndon almost never begrudged other’s success, he had many faults -1000s of them- but he did not get jealous of others like that; not in that way. He was one of those people who just compared himself to who he was yesterday and to who or what he could become today or tomorrow if he lived that long. He did not envy another man’s success.
He genuinely liked himself; and thought he was exactly who he wanted to be. And like all things that are innate to a creature, he took that for granted as a baseline in other men. All men think -stupidly- that other men are constituted like they are. Michael Swinyard, for all his faults, for all his evil, had taught Lyndon that very thing. They had been walking up and down the rows of marijuana plants in one of Lyndon’s indoor grows one night back in 2015 and Michael had said that very thing.
Lyndon had took it as received wisdom, and agreed -upon reflection- that men, himself very much included tended to think that there was a universal human language that all men tried to adhere to; and when any man broke that agreement they themselves would know it and feel badly about such a transgression. Lyndon used reason and logic -and his facility with language- to prove why such and such and so and so should behave and think and feel in this or that way. He was wrong and yet felt so right, and it took the wisdom of a man as low and evil as Michael to school him in the reality of life. Even the Devil is sometimes right
, even if used as a trick to confuse you , he thought.
He had thought reason ruled the day, and since he’d thought about things so much more deeply than most, and since -he could honestly say- he was willing to suss out the hypocrisy in his own behavior and admit to where he had fallen down on job so-to-speak, he thought that he was in a natural position of authority to arbitrate right and wrong among men.
It was only years later that he realized that men were just animals and animals just did whatever they needed to do in order to survive based upon their own peculiar genome and gene expression and that most men -in fact over 80%- did not have his peculiar genes. As one middle-eastern herder, he thought, had put it -in Black and Michaud’s 1975 book on herding cultures- “raids are our agriculture .”
For all the crimes he would be accused -and convicted- of, Lyndon had committed the one real crime in life: he had been other than what he was.
If true genius, as Monk had said, is he who is most like himself , then true stupidity is the man who acts like everybody else, the man who does what is common, acceptable and the norm when his every allele is statistically aberrant from the common blueprint of tout le monde. Psychiatrists tried to get men to fit in to an evil and sick culture, artists attempted to get the culture itself to change to fit the unique man. Maybe both were wrong, he thought. Maybe the real way to live is opposed and in conflict and to the death.
Lyndon was a scion of the Scottish sheepherder, it was in his blood and balls and brains. He was one generation removed from the south, a mere 300 years from the Highlands themselves, and in genomic terms that is less than a three-hundredth of second. And here he was trying to be a farmer, a horticulturist, instead of a herder. He was growing plants -and doing it well- and he was engaging in cooperative trade.
See, and this is a subtle point , he thought, he may have been engaged in cooperative trade, but he didn’t have the ingratiating, cloying, ass-kissing personality of the salesman, like his brother, and so while he was a great farmer, he was a terrible salesman and in that farming milieu he had all the wrong personality traits.
