5:40am September 9, 2013

Practically everyone thinks they’re doing either the right thing, or the only possible thing, at the time.

There are major exceptions but I’m not talking about them here.

This goes back to how we all tell ourselves stories about the world. And in most of our stories, we are the good guy.

I sometimes get into other people’s heads. I don’t know how and I don’t know what I’m doing and I rarely intend to do it. They don’t have to be currently alive. I just have to know a little thing that moves me in the right direction any for a split second I am not me anymore.

There are all kinds of things in there that are very different from me and from each other. People with emotional and intellectual landscapes that, while everyone contains the same component parts, are so foreign it’s amazing to imagine they exist.

But everyone this has happened with, they all thought they were doing the right thing at the time. And if part of them knew it was wrong it was heavily buried under stories. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes not so deliberately.

At some point - I actually remember the exact moment but prefer to keep it private - I realized that whatever knowledge this ability gives me, it does not, not directly, give me knowledge of right and wrong.

Because on any given issue, including issues that are quite dear to me, I’ve seen into the viewpoints of people on all sides of them. Not just the words and ideas, but the memories and emotions and live experiences that lead each person to be certain they are right. And from the point of view of inside that person, every single person is incredibly persuasive. None more than the next.

And that is what is the same in everyone who has a sense of right and wrong at all. We all have experiences and thoughts and emotions that tell us what we think is right. We all(*) have stories we tell ourselves, that we get so caught up in that we mistake them for reality. And all these things combine to give us an idea of what we think is the right thing to do. Our to justify our own actions to ourselves.

So in a less direct way, this ability does tell me something about right and wrong. It tells me I am as untrustworthy as any other person to figure it all out on my own. I mean most people agree on the basics, but when it comes to the complicated execution in real life situations? We all have different ideas and many times those ideas serve our own biases, stories, specific life experiences, and hidden motivations.

Sometimes what I see scares me. I’ve seen into the mind of someone who got fired up with righteous anger and a lifetime of injustice and played with some really dangerous symbolism, started a movement… People died. He’s not famous. Few people outside the movement know his name. But as I was learning about it that thing happened… And suddenly for seconds at a time I felt like I was him or some of the people around him and I got caught up in the emotion of the moment and I wanted what they wanted and then… I was on the outside again, myself again, knowing the outcomes of their actions, that may have been avoided if they were not so sure they were right.

That kind of thing gives me whiplash.

I know, I’m autistic, I’m not supposed to do this, but from what I’ve seen, intense involuntary empathy, of many kinds including this, is a feature of being autistic for many of us, no matter what the experts say. I can’t voluntarily put myself in someone’s mindset, but I often find myself there.

And in the aftermath of the attempted murder of Issy Stapleton, I find myself really really upset at all these autism parents who call for more empathy any time someone says that murder is absolutely wrong and that judging or condemning it is a terrible thing.

Luckily, I have not seen inside the mind of Kelli Stapleton. I’ve seen the edges, and the storms, and I don’t want to see it from her perspective. I would want to wash my brain out afterwards.

Some of her supporters are right about one thing, I think, but totally wrong in the conclusions they draw from it (and probably wrong in the ways they come at it too, but that’s a finer distinction).

It is, I think, actually true that put in the right position, most people would find it possible to kill and to feel right about killing even when that killing is a hundred prevent wrong.

But.

The fact that I could see myself getting mind warped enough to kill, does not mean that the right thing for me to do is sit around at every murder extending sympathy for the murderer.

Because… How do I even try to explain this? Killing another human being is something hardwired into most human beings as a really bad idea. Most people have a really thick barrier between themselves and murder. To become a murderer, they have to erode that barrier down more and more and more and more until they can do it. (And once it’s done, they have an incredibly hard time putting it back up. One murderer likened it to having a wild animal loose in your brain that you have to restrain.)

Lots of things can erode that barrier. Some things are so powerful they can smash it down all at once. Other things pick at it piece by piece until they finally chip through to that other side.

But that means there are people whose barrier to murder has been chipped down to an inch thick. And that means that anything that chips down that barrier even an inch is a danger to their potential victims.

Some things that I know erode that barrier:

* Seeing murder of a certain class of person as more understandable or acceptable. That includes disabled people.

* Saying that murders occur because parents of disabled children don’t get services. There’s a proven correlation between media coverage of this sort and an increase in murders.

* Public sympathy with murderers of a certain sort, such as parents who murder disabled children.

* Saying it’s understandable for parents of disabled children (or of disabled violent children, or of disabled children in certain specific situations) to murder those children.

* Dehumanizing the victims

Every single one of those things erodes the wall between being a potential murderer and a real murderer. Every single one of those things is a serious threat to disabled children. People who say any of those things are, knowingly or not, endangering disabled children. And adults. But children are usually more threatened.

And if empathy with most killers is your thing? You would not be so hell bent on destroying those walls in their heads. Because they will have to live the rest of their lives with the consequences of having killed. And those consequences are not pretty. Shattering that wall shatters important parts of the self. Very few people can recover.

That’s of course nothing compared to the devastation that happens to the victim. But it’s still devastation. And anyone who had an ounce of actual empathy (including actual understanding) for people who have killed people, would not be focused on making that person’s actions seem understandable. Because that is just setting up the same tragedy the murderer and their victim and their families just went through. Eroding a wall. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of how that wall gets eroded, would back off in horror at the very thought of eroding it in another.

Many of the people calling for empathy are not actually people understanding what happened or how it happened. They are people whose walls are partially eroded themselves, who can see that if that (few feet, few inches, few millimeters?) of wall were gone in themselves, they would have done the same thing. And since they can’t see themselves as bad people, they say “she is not a bad person”. And in doing so they erode more and more people’s walls. I still remember the two or three murders that happened the WEEK “Autism Every Day” came out, don’t tell me that’s coincidence.

Saying that murder is wrong and inexcusable. Saying that disabled children are not acceptable targets. Saying that extending this twisted brand of understanding to child murderers is dangerous. THESE ARE WAYS WE KEEP WALLS AGAINST MURDER INTACT AND BUILD UP WALLS THAT HAVE BEEN DAMAGED. Condemning murder builds up walls in ourselves and in other people. We need those walls to keep those on the edge from stepping over the edge. .

Most of what people are calling empathy here is just self-pity. And self-pity erodes those walls and warps the conscience to believe the feelings of would-be murderers are more important than the existence of their victims.

True empathy for either murderer or victim would have you doing anything you could, anything at all, to prevent anyone’s internal walls against murder from eroding any further. Knowing that most of us are capable of murder should only strengthen that desire, not weaken it. It’s the near universal desire to believe oneself a good person no matter what one does, that gets people so twisted up that they would erode those walls further rather than admit, “we are all capable of terrible things, and that means we need to strengthen these walls to prevent them happening, whether it’s murder or something else”.

And if you’ve never seen the horror and betrayal from the POV of the victims… Don’t tell me I lack empathy.

I love you Issy.

*****

(*) Except a tiny number of people who have managed to destroy stories, and the mechanisms that create them, forever. They are rare, I am not one of them, and I have had only the tiniest glimpse into the mind of any of them, which stunned me to the core. Because I could see in one tiny instant the enormity of the difference between him at that point in his life and me at this point in my life. And that was… As if my mind is full of layers upon layers of machinery, never noticed in full until I saw its absence in someone else. And when I saw that difference, I saw why people didn’t believe him when he tried to talk about it. But people like him are still fallible in all kinds of ways that don’t have to do with stories.

Notes: