Devils in the Details
I was recently in Tasmania for the first time in my life. This island at the southern tip of Australia is an evolutionary anachronism, the land that time forgot. The capital city, Hobart, does not look so different from anywhere else in 2019, but the animal population of the island is where the history gets told. The wombats, penguins, platypuses, echidna (looking like a mini porcupine) and, of course, the eponymous Tasmanian Devil. This small carnivorous marsupial has the distinction of having a Warner Brothers cartoon character modeled after it. It’s like the honey badger, it don’t care how crazy aggressive it gets. Sometimes you need to get crazy aggressive to survive the onslaught of nature.
I am troubled by the rigors of business. I want more grace than nature at this stage of my life. I think I preferred grace my whole life, but grace tends not to pay so well. I think the poor Tasmanian Devil is probably a lovely creature that would make a fine pet in a perfect world. Wait a minute, that’s just not so. The Tasmanian Devil is inherently an aggressive animal and I bet that despite my mental meanderings to the contrary, I am prone to business more than I like to admit. Despite my storytelling, I have too much testosterone to be an artist. I am a business person. But does that mean I need to be crazy aggressive at all times?
Stepping away from business for a moment, I am troubled by the aggressive tendencies I see in Washington, mostly exhibited by Republicans, but sometimes by Democrats as well. The difference seems to me to mostly be that Democrats are aggressive by response and Republicans are aggressive by nature. Generalizations are never good, but never say never. I do believe that some people are inherently uncaring of others. They are driven to dominate or die trying. Those are the people that trouble me the most and I see more Republicans that exhibit that tendency than Democrats.
My question as someone who prospered, if not dominated, on Wall Street, one of the most aggressive arenas known to man, is whether one can be aggressive to this extent and still be a person with grace in his heart? Can he be a person who fundamentally cares about other people? I think so. Does that inform anything about aggressive Republicans? I’m less certain. On Wall Street one could be aggressive without being aggressive actively against others. In politics, the policies one pursues tend to show direct causality and thus are either good to the majority or harsh to the majority. How can cutting Medicare and pre-existing conditions possibly be portrayed as anything other than directly aggressive against the majority?
I would love to have a day with a staunch Republican conservative and show that person pictures of the impact of their policies and see the reaction. I suspect the initial reaction is to look away and say that it is sensationalism to show them pictures of burning babies. But ultimately, I want to probe past that denial and understand how a person can be uncaring to the extent that they understand the harm their policies will inflict. Is it all nature versus grace with prejudice or is it simply acceptance of the dominance of nature? I am more willing to accept the later than a general lack of caring. Saying “I’m sorry, but that’s life” is somehow far better to me than “I don’t care.” The net result is no different, but intent matters in life and the intent of indifference scares me.
It troubles me when I see blatant criminality (oh, say, like Presidential obstruction of justice and dismissal of the rule of law), but I listen to legal experts and prosecutors say that intent is all-important in establishing criminality. I’m not sure that anyone can ever divine intent in the soul of man, so how do we get at this caring or not caring problem? I wonder if there is a psychological test one can give to people to tell if they have empathy for others or not. I am sure I have heard of such a test. It’s called an EQ (Empathy Quotient) test and its 60 questions long, developed by the Autism research folks. It is supposed to measure the level of social impairment in adults and they say it’s OK for the general population, not just people of aberrant behavior (remember Young Frankenstein’s Abby Normal?). I’ve read through the 60 questions and some seem too obvious and some I don’t get at all (uh-oh). My favorite is “When I was a child, I enjoyed cutting up worms to see what would happen.” You don’t even get to choose yes or no….it’s all about how strongly you agree. Pulling wings off flies I understand, but cutting up worms is out of bounds.
But I’m just not prepared to let bad people off the hook so easily. Just declaring that you have a low EQ shouldn’t absolve you of all responsibility to care about the rest of the human race. Maybe if your IQ and EQ are both low, you can be forgiven, but if you are a very high IQ guy like Trump (he said it, not me), you have an obligation to work on your EQ and figure out how you can make life better for other people. At least that’s what comports with my morality. I am wondering if it would be a good idea to have all presidential candidates going forward to be required to take three or four tests in addition to submitting 10 years of tax returns. They should be required to take an EQ test, an IQ test and maybe a reading comprehension test. I would never have thought of this last one except that the current occupant of the White House seems to have a new problem in this regard.
Think about it. Before we elect anyone to the highest office in the land, they would have to put on display their full range of attributes and skills. It seems perfectly logical to me. I’m not saying we need a genius in the White House or even a warm and fuzzy empath, but it sure would be nice to know we don’t have a dope, a sociopath, a crook or an illiterate in the Oval Office. As you can imagine, there would be no assurance that all the sociopaths might not like having a sociopathic leader and then vote him or her in, but I do think it would be good to know who we are getting. TO bring us back to our original theme, the devil in this game-plan would clearly be in the detail. I would want to know who was administering the tests. I don’t want that long-haired crazy doctor Trump used for his physical to be asking about cutting up worms.