The amount of destruction and human suffering that we see pictured every night on our newscasts, in Ukraine, is immense. We suffer inside as we see pictures of blasted apartment buildings, piles of concrete rubble, leveled community centers, fireballs above hospitals, rescuers desperately digging bodies out of collapsed buildings, crying children walking beside mothers carrying babies, displaced from their homes, bearing their only possessions in their arms, older children with vacant stares on their faces, traumatized for the rest of their lives.
We suffer inside to see that the infrastructure of their civilization is being targeted and systematically bombed by powerful missiles. Schools, hospitals, power plants, bridges, previously serving a thriving and nurturing community, are now reduced to crumpled masses of twisted steel, piles of bricks and concrete blocks, fallen walls and shattered glass. The cost of rebuilding a sustaining society on these grounds will be immense, and will be sustained by citizens who did nothing to warrant this massive destruction. Further, all the rest of human society has been pulled into this conflict, causing more deterioration of our civilization as we know it, in multiple nations. All the nations on earth have become engulfed in this raging conflagration. We are, around the globe, already paying a very dear price for this vicious attack on democracy and a thriving society. And none of it is necessary. The normal rules of ethical conduct are being flagrantly violated.
A normal, nurturing, and progressive society follows certain rules which are, in social psychology terms, called tit for tat, and in common language terms, called tough love. If you cooperate with me, I will cooperate with you. If you fail to cooperate with me, or attack me, then I distance myself from you, refuse to help you until you have clearly demonstrated your willingness to cooperate with me. I will look for someone with whom I can cooperate, so we can grow things together, build things together, accomplishing more than either of us could do on our own. If other cooperative humans join in, then we can develop a community with common goals. Marvelous things then become possible. We can build streets, bridges, tunnels, pipe lines, develop power stations, power grids, hospitals, schools, houses, skyscrapers, jet airplanes. We can even, with several years of sustained effort, build a telescope, launch it into space, and see back in time 14 billion years ago. Wow!
Tough love builds societies. Christian love, which, in that culture means turning the other cheek, does not build nurturing and protecting societies. The meek shall inherit the earth only because they are getting walked on. It’s a jungle out there. There is, at every turn, someone who is hostile, someone who steals, someone who does not care; our lives have multiple obstacles to our progress. Passivity to aggression will only earn us slave status, being abused for someone else’s advantage. Aggression must be answered by aggression, or else we are in trouble. That’s because we have psychopaths in our societies, who think and feel differently.
Normal people are able to cooperate with other humans because they have empathy. They have compassion for the needs of other humans. When we do MRI scans on humans who express feeling a moment of compassion at that time, multiple areas of the cerebral cortex light up, including tactile, auditory, visual and motor centers, as well as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. In other words, that person is directly feeling and motivated by what he or she understands is happening to another human, be it fear, pain, or joy. He or she is driven to help that other person if that person is in pain or grave danger. Those humans who are real life heroes, acting immediately to pull a person out of a burning car, or jump into freezing water to save a drowning child, say that they acted instantaneously, without thinking. It was what they had to do, without second thought.
Contrast that response to the response of a psychopath, when he or she is aware of some other human who is in dire distress or great pain. The MRI in these individuals does not light up at all. They do not feel anyone else’s pain, Their amygdalas are empty. They can experience no joy from someone else’s joy, can feel no suffering when some other human is intensely suffering; they feel no immediate compulsion to help in any way when another human is in trouble. Instead, they see ways they can put that suffering to their advantage. Their only pleasure in life is by manipulating other humans in any way that will be to that psychopath’s advantage. Most of them are male. The psychopath is often intelligent, charming, may be charismatic, but is also cunning and lies constantly to get what he wants from others. He believes his own lies, and has no morals about doing whatever it takes to get him what he wants. He is amoral; he has no ethics. He sees cooperation as weakness. He sees retaliation not in kind as weakness. The psychopath takes whatever he wants, and continues to take, until someone puts up a force stronger than he can present, to stop him.
Passive resistance is a powerful tool, as taught to us by Mahatma Gandhi. It only works, however, in a society in which the majority of the population that is in control is able to feel compassion. Passive resistance does not work at all when faced with a psychopath. Direct confrontation is the only action that the psychopath understands. He will continue to lie and to take whatever he can, with no remorse for any suffering or death he has caused, until he is faced with a force stronger than that force he can muster. That is why the appeasement of Hitler did not work leading up to WW II. Appeasement, Christian love, tit for tat, tough love, passive resistance, all fail miserably when dealing with the psychopath.
Vladimir Putin is a psychopath. He is causing immense human suffering, death and destruction in Ukraine, and is a threat to civilization around the world. All that pain, loss, and diminution of civilization mean nothing to him. His only interest is in feeding his megalomania of recreating the Russian empire, with him as the boss. Until the rest of the world puts a stop to his evil directions, all of civilization will suffer. All the other nations of the world should not hesitate to use whatever force is necessary to stop Vladimir Putin. He will not stop his campaign of evil destruction until absolutely forced to do so. So far, we are not doing enough. The United States of America did not hesitate to intervene when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Why are we waiting now? It is time to act, with more than censures.
Our counterpart, in the United States of America, is Donald John Trump, who is also a flaming psychopath. Trump has committed treason, trying in every way he can to subvert the democratic election that he lost to Joe Biden. He tried to appoint an Attorney General who would support his lies, and overturn the election results. He tried to send fake electors to the Senate, who would submit fake election results. He tried to appoint a Special Counsel who would challenge and change the election results. He tried to get the military to seize ballot boxes, so that those votes cast could be invalidated. He called state officials in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, asking them to manufacture votes for him, rather than Biden. When all of his lying schemes failed, he then called together a mob, which marched on the capital, invaded congress, destroyed and stole property of our government, wanted to hang his Vice President, Mike Pence. Their goal was to take physical possession of the electoral vote, and change it in favor of Donald Trump. Trump showed no remorse about attempting to subvert and trash our democratic process. Trump showed no remorse about the possibility of his Vice President being hanged, stating: “He would have deserved it.”
None of us is safe from losing our precious democracy while this psychopath in on the loose. Only when he is behind bars can we stop trembling.