Jim and Karen: A Sociopath
greater than the Sum of Its Parts.
Earlier this afternoon I was
about to perform a Google Search with the query: “is jim halpert the devil?” As
I was typing the query, four of the first five recommendations corroborated my
suspicions, starting with “is jim halpert a sociopath” and ending with “is jim
halpert a terrible guy”. The other two are “is jim halpert a jerk” and “is jim
halpert a bully”. The black sheep of the group is “is jim halpert married”.
Yes: all five would be represented by the Devil card from the Medieval Tarot.
But delighted as I was to find corroboration for my suspicions, my faith in
Humanity reaffirmed by the Mass, even via the impersonal medium of the
Internet, this faith is threatened by the thought that it was even a question.
There is too much to be said
on this matter to be contained in one weblog entry. My twenty-two page
manifesto on Michael Scott all ready suggests the obvious about Jim. But before
I corroborate the obvious* by making him and his girlfriend Karen the focus of
this sequel, drawing on their relationship from Season Three, I must explain
just what a sociopath is.
*Yes, Jim: this seems superfluous,
and pointing that out would do you wonders where less discerning minds are
concerned. But as I have all ready pointed out: the matter is still in
question, and Court is still in session. So the obvious SHALL BE corroborated.
The principle of the Categorical
Imperative indicates that one should all ways treat others as one wants to be
treated, and in such a fashion that if all followed one’s example then there
would be Moral Order and perhaps even Utopia. Most adolescents go to college
hoping that the ideals they spent eighteen years internalizing would allow them
to coexist in absolute harmony with their peers, devoid of conflict and
predation. They systematically repress those deviant and antisocial aspects of
their personalities that would disrupt this project, until social dictate
affords them the opportunity to integrate those repressed Shadow aspects into
their conscious personalities in a manner that is healthy and productive. This
opportunity must arise early enough to prevent projection, a consequence of
repression that has the consequence of innocent people suffering for crimes
they did not commit. The development, meanwhile, of a Healthy Ego allows the
conscientious person to see himself and others with Absolute Moral Clarity. In
the same way as the Sun illuminates one’s reflection in the bathroom mirror,
Justice illuminates one’s identity in the total privacy of conscience. This
allows a man to remain loyal to Humanity without needing to accommodate any one
person that seeks to supplant it. If all men were conscientious, no such threat
to one’s conscience would even ever arise.
The Corporate Office Setting
does everything in its power to actualize Kant’s dreams of Moral Perfection. But
it is perpetually sabotaged by parasites, apparent only to the discerning eye,
(of Dwight K. Schrute, etc.) who operate without a conscience. These
individuals, for reasons of which Reason knows nothing, masquerading as Reasons
of the Heart, (exploiting the claim that it is the HEART, alone, that has
reasons that defy Reason) turn the system in on itself, content to allow it to
collapse under the burden of their own egoism.
These individuals are called
sociopaths.
At every step in the workings
of a Moral Order, the parasite inserts a monkey wrench. It turns the Ego against
the Shadow. It represses the Shadow indefinitely until it inevitably alienates
a victim of projection. If that “victim” is the sociopath itself, the sociopath
uses the same means in self-defense, at the EXPENSE of the Projector, (who has
now BECOME the victim of a Competition of which he is barely CONSCIOUS) that it
had used to instigate the inhumane repression to begin with. If the repressed
person tries to express the Shadow, the instigator appeals to the Ego,
exploiting a conscience totally foreign to it. If the repressed person’s Ego is
bypassed, the instigator calls the Shadow into the Public Light, consolidating
the divide within the victim. If the victim projects Shadow upon the
instigator, the instigator either redirects the projection upon the Ego, or it
calls the projection into the Public Light. If the victim becomes aware of the
instigator’s TRUE evil, either of these tactics work by misattributing the
revelation to projection.
In
this way, the victim of a parasite never attains Holiness, which is of course
Wholeness in the True Sense, and both the conscience and its allied Shadow
suffer from a forced parting of the ways less humane than the Berlin Wall.
If this dynamic seems to say
less about the writer and more about the dynamic between Jim and Dwight, then I
am spared the drudgery of digging through his endless feats of narcissism. If
any part of this seems to reflect upon me, it is only in direct proportion to
my semblance to Dwight. Even people who have known me well would not deny the Crowd
the opportunity to jeer at me for being all too Dwightly. Stereotypes make the
perfect masks for those who are not ashamed to wear them.
I have all ready established
that Jim and Pam are greater together than the sum of their parts. Now I will demonstrate
that Jim and KAREN are worse together than the sum of their parts. And having
proven that Jim is a narcissist, I have only Karen left to deal with. Do I dare
to turn upon a character portrayed by Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones
and Peggy Lipton? Only because it is a testament to the brilliance of Pisceans
that they can play psychopaths so well. Hash-tag Bryan Cranston. Hash-tag
Breaking Bad forever.
KAREN AND RYAN:
Karen is manipulative. When
Ryan sends her an e-mail confessing his feelings of romantic interest in her,
she does not reply to him directly. The reply in her stead comes from Jim, who
lies that she is not interested in dating any one at the office at this time.
The lie is transparent to Jim, Ryan, and Kevin, the hebephrenic who hides his
grin behind a women’s magazine at this moment; Kevin is intellectually
developed enough to grasp the contradiction that Jim has just openly admitted
to his ongoing relationship with Karen, which is nearing its semi-anniversary,
but Kevin is too underdeveloped emotionally to stifle his own childish sense of
humour. We may never know whether Karen had put Jim up to delivery of the
message that she owed to Ryan herself, or whether Halpert simply lied in order
to assert his dominance over Ryan, who had never done more wrong to him except
by taking his seat next to Pam whilst Jim’s romance with Karen was budding in Connecticut.
All we know is that if Ryan tried to confront Jim and Karen about the
injustice, he would be met with a Daedalean labyrinth of mind games worthy of
the works of Franz Kafka. Jim and Karen would both try to break the argument
into pieces and then turn them against one an other. For instance: if Jim was
not SUPPOSED to deliver the message that Karen SHOULD have delivered directly,
why should Jim be penalized for the lateness of the delivery? Should he be
penalized for the delivery alone, or is he being penalized for having withheld
this information for so long? And if the latter, why? The truth is apparent to
any conscientious person: Aware that his significant other is violating Ryan’s
trust, the responsibility falls to Jim to deliver the Truth. But we do not even
know whether or not it is TRUE that Karen wanted Jim to lie on her behalf! In
the event that it is UNTRUE, we might suppose that Jim had no such obligation.
But then the burden of the lie would still fall upon BOTH of them, Jim for
inventing it, and Karen for enabling it. B.J. Novak’s character remains the
blameless victim in this love triangle, and I do not doubt that this reflects
the writer’s own struggles. Hence B.J. Novak himself becomes at once victim and
omniscient narrator in this subtle sitcom that documents both his own foibles
(as in the episode when he insults his Egalitarian and Human-hearted Boss) and
those of his manipulative coworkers.
KAREN AND JIM IN CONNECTICUT:
When Jim meets Karen, there is
not so much instant chemistry as there is instant corrosion. (Of course, the
latter falls under chemistry literally, implying that the latter is a qualified
version of the former, but idiomatically it is ironically divergent whilst
remaining cognate, hence the seeming grammatical paradox.) Andrew Bernard
deludes himself that Karen is interested in him, but as the series unfolds one
begins to wonder if perhaps this delusion was NOT of his own device. When Andy
busts out a bottle of alcohol and shot glasses, the three all-nighters in the
Stamford branch of Dunder Mifflin engage in a drinking ritual in which Karen,
who CONVENIENTLY sits in the back of the room, behind the two of them,
abstains, pretending to get drunk with them so that she can take an inebriating
Jim home later.
Karen’s mind games are not
confined to Andy. As I all ready suggested, Jim is a victim as well. Why do I
bother then, if it has all ready been made clear, to specify this? Only
because, up until this point, he might appear to be too lucky to be a victim.
So now that I have established that this thesis is not the conclusion from the
former paragraph but rather the thesis of what follows as well, may we
disregard it, for the time being, as a premise without warrant for what follows,
so that I will not be accused (by the narcissists in the audience, who form a
considerable and regrettable fraction of my readership) of tautology.
When Jim gives Karen the
squeaky chair, she eventually retaliates by using it to create enough noise
pollution to persuade him to trade back. Subtler viewings and reflections as
dawn upon me presently reveal the underlying vengefulness of this woman; she must
have surmised by now that Jim could subject her to the same torture should he
agree to trade. Her act is meant merely to spite Jim, hoping that in the worst
of all outcomes he will retaliate in a manner that is directly proportional. A
woman with an unassailable Will to Power, she would be proud to demonstrate her
superiority to him by withstanding the same precise torture without folding as
he had done.
But Jim throws her a
curve-ball by singing “Lovefool” by the Cardigans. Indignant but amused, she
replies that the punishment is in “no way proportional” because the song will
now be stuck in her head all day. This sums up the relationship betwixt Jim and
Karen: mutual, competitive sadism. If it could be put into lyrics, its sincerity
of feeling would be expressed thus:
“Love
me, love me.
Pretend
that you love me.
Fool
me, fool me.
Go
on and fool me.”
The term “subtext” does not do
justice to this degree of dramatic irony and transparency. May I also point out
that it is ANDY BERNARD that gets the squeaky chair at the end. He all so ends
up sleeping in the Office whilst Karen drives Jim’s drunk ass home.
Karen likes Jim. Don’t get me
wrong. She even takes a job in Scranton, Pennsylvania when the Stamford branch
closes, just to be around him. She knows that he does not like her, but she
likes him, so she is willing to go the distance and take the risk. I admired
her courage initially. But seeing the extent to which she would take it I have
chills in reassessing the source of her risk-taking as being due less to
courage and more to pathological confidence.
KAREN AND THE OTHER MEN:
A little more needs to be said
about sociopaths before I proceed.
Sociopaths are extremely
competitive. The entire notion of harmonious co-existence with their human
fellows is lost to them. They are relativists, and as such they are by
definition degenerates who fall short of the Categorical Imperative. The
Categorical Imperative has three prongs, two of which I have all ready
detailed. The third is that one must never employ some one else as a means
towards an end. Behaving in such a way that one’s actions serve to set an
example that would produce Utopia if followed Universally, one asserts the
Universality of the action as Good, and hence one establishes as Universal the
Goodness of the Action. An action cannot be good FOR one person and evil for an
other; it must be good FOR ALL, for if it were not so, then it would cease to
be Utopian if implemented by everyone, for those to whom it would be evil would
become a Means towards an End.
It is not uncommon for a
sociopath to expect others to accommodate their violations and infringements
upon the rights of their fellows. They are uncompromising and ruthless, and
others are mere means towards their ends. In a state of rage, a victim of a
narcissistic attack may lash out with a violence greater than the initial
injustice. At that point the victim must assert the Absolute Quality of his or
her own will as an end in and of itself. One is ridiculed and made to bear the
burden for the pathological selfishness of others, for left to one’s own
devices, and repeatedly reminded that no one else HAS to care (a blatant lie,
of course), one must become uncompromising. Yet this was never the victim’s
fault to begin with; it was the sociopath who was TEMPERAMENTALLY INCAPABLE of accommodating
any one who threatened his own self-interested agenda. Others were simply
reduced to this state of desperation by the circumstances that the parasite
created.
The altruist demands only that
justice be served to all, including one’s self. Hence he made it his life’s
work, since childhood, to learn and to observe every social dictate necessary
to earn one’s share of the fruits of common labour. The sociopath, conversely,
only serves itself. It is not allied with Justice and Morality. It is the very
antithesis of it. And this is the most blatant giveaway: that they deny the
Absolute Quality of an Individual’s Rights. An individual owns the people that
he chooses to interact with; there can be no other motive for social
intercourse. When his personal property turns on him, it ceases to be an
extension of his own person. This is called identity theft; the Individual has
become a Person by entrusting other Individuals with Personhood. When they act
in such a way that the Individual did not intend and could not possibly have
desired, they cease to be People, for they have used the Individual’s trust
towards ends that the Individual had clearly not intended, and by so doing they
reduced the Individual to a means towards an End. Yet one must be cautious to
observe, upon having been betrayed by such parasites, the early onset of
narcissistic abuse. It is tragically stupid to make the same mistake twice, and
often a narcissist will try to control your behaviour punitively even if you
are aware of your own blamelessness. This is done by keeping you isolated from
the remainder of the Human Family, even when your actions in no way infringe upon
an other Individual. A sense of “belonging” to people does not compromise one’s
freedom in any way; what compromises freedom is an UNINVITED CONFLICT. And this
conflict is no mere divergence of opinion and approach to Public Life; it is a
sub-animalistic COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES that were the property of the
Individual and not of other Individuals. This is true jealousy; all else is
manipulation, and it is no coincidence that manipulative people who are “betrayed”
by insubordination in petty matters do their part to avenge themselves by
infliction of ACTUAL SUFFERING upon their closest “friends”, by turning their
friends’ friends and lovers against them.
All of this was what Karen by
her mere presence in the Office does to Jim and Pam.
Karen is not only a liar. She
is all so a sadist. And this conclusion, which I have all ready proven, remains
the thesis of what follows, though having been proven all ready it will
function perhaps all so as a warrant.
When Jim and Karen attend a
house party, Karen maintains a veneer of sociability, yet her insincerity is
exposed when she is outshone by Dwight. Karen pretends to enjoy the surrounding
architecture, but she falters when Dwight takes the initiative to assess the
house’s foundation, dimensions, and quality in proportion to its price. Like
most narcissists, Karen does not truly care about the house; she is simply
upholding a veneer so as to be able to USE social convention to her own ends.
Later, Karen tells Jim to
avoid a certain patron who she claims to have dated. Jim does not react with
shock at the thought that his own girlfriend brought him to a party that is
inhabited by an ex. To him, it seems totally normal to infringe upon a social
setting that is intended for solidarity and cheer, turning the entire thing
into a competition whose true nature is stifled by what has now become the HUSK
of hospitality: the futile attempt to maintain a polite veneer so as not to be
held guilty and responsible for the decadent turn of events. To a sociopath,
such competitions are FUN, for he believes that he has all ready won and that
any plaints are signs of weakness. It does not matter if tomorrow or at some
other point within the season he breaks up the formality with Karen. All that
matters is that for that fleeting moment he can use that formality to assert
his own sense of dominance.
After Karen has expanded her
ruse to include three separate men, Jim asks, with shock and hyperbole, if she
has dated every man in the crowded building. Of course, she can barely keep a
straight face even as he humours this megalomaniacal fantasy. Her hoax is
exposed. Yet just as Truth dawns upon him that she has lied to him yet again,
she lies once more, by telling him that he was the first man that she ever
dated. Again, he believes her, and rightfully so, though this time, inexplicably,
with the same shock as when he believed the opposite extreme. And what does
Karen do at this point? She MOCKS him for believing it. She warrants his
incredulity, insisting that not ONLY was he gullible for believing her whorish
story, but that he was EQUALLY gullible for imagining himself to matter to her.
AND HE ACCEPTS THIS. We may never know if she had lied or not; he might have
been, in fact, her first, but she would not admit to this, and thus loses the
integrity that comes with celibacy.
Sociopaths would swarm over
the apparent contradictions in my argument, again, and yet again owing to a
lack of standards. All parasites want you to level with them; for them, life
makes sense because it is never refined. Contradiction of any sort sounds like
condescension, and condescension of any sort is presumed unwarranted. They lack
any sense of a Higher Good in the light of which all contradictions are seen as
God’s Paradox.
In this case, one might ask
this question:
If Jim was FOOLISH for having believed
that Karen was a whore, why should he be EXPECTED to believe that he was her
first boyfriend? Why shouldn’t he have his doubts about this claim when the
most recent one was so far-fetched? Are both claims not EQUALLY extreme, and
should they not therefore be EQUALLY dismissed? If I say: he should know better
than to believe that she would bring him to a party that an ex is in attendance
of, then how can I say: He should BELIEVE her when she claims she has no exes
whatsoever?
The truth lies in that ONE
extreme is to be ridiculous, and the other is to be expected. A Libra strives
only for balance if it is a sociopath. Jim is willing to believe that she has
slept with at least three men in this building. Logic alone would dictate that
he DISBELIEVE that she was virginal upon meeting Jim, considering that Jim
considers it so probable that she has slept all ready with three men, or at
least showed interest in eventually doing so (as would appear, of course, only
to a rational person, which Jim is not, deep down). It would appear, therefore,
that in regarding Jim as a victim of the first lie I should expect him to disbelieve
the second by the same token. But a narcissist is never a true victim; he
believes the second lie only out of vanity, not victimhood. Jim is, as I have
stated parenthetically, not rational. He understands that those three men might
have been mere MEANS for Karen’s ENDS; she may have never even opened up to
them intimately. He does not presume that she was virginal upon meeting him
because of some sort of personal virtue. He simply flatters himself at the
thought of it.
To Jim, any gradation is
permissible. Karen could fuck every man in the building, or one man, or none
ever except Jim. So long as she fucks Jim, Jim is content.
Presuming that they even fuck.
A rational man would not
settle for this. A sociopath feigns humility by enabling conflicts that he
believes that he will win. Personally, I would EXPECT my girlfriend never to
bring me to a social function haunted by her irreversible mistakes, and if she
told me that I was her First (and Only) Love, I would not doubt her honour. But
this would appear no different from what the sociopath does to the casual
observer who is only privy to some part of the situation. Hence I avoid parties
like the plague.
The giveaway is that he does
not throw a fit the moment that she even mentions an ex present. For once, I
side with Roy, who smashes glass and threatens Jim’s life when he learns that
his fiancée kissed Jim during their engagement, the result of which was that
the wedding was called off, to Pam’s immense chagrin when Phyllis stole the
fruits of all her planning.
PAM AND KAREN:
When Pam finally speaks the
Truth, in accordance with her long-repressed Sagittarian nature, and without
apology, she not only triggers an angry Roy who loses his job. We root for Roy,
who was for once the TRUE victim, as every one in the neurotic madhouse of an
Office inexplicably defends Jim. Again: the Mass is not omniscient.
What Pam all so achieves in
addition to Roy’s outburst of heroism is that she offends Karen. Karen calls
Pam a “kind of a bitch” in private, establishing her competitive nature for a
fact.
What Pam does for Jim is that
she brings out his positive qualities.
What Karen does is that she
brings out Jim’s negative qualities.
Both
Pam and Karen appear incorrigible. It is only Jim that has a choice: Goodness or
Evil?
Most of this drama would be
prevented if society altered its angle. We treat relationships as though they
required two people to initiate and one person to cancel. Why not the obverse?
Why not require one person to initiate relationship, and two people to cancel?
After all: if every life matters, are the needs of one man not enough? Who are
you to deny that to any one? A new approach to dating would weed out all the
creeps REALLY quickly, however attractive they might seem at first.
Of course: the Rationality
necessary to make a fair assessment of one’s own rights has all ways been a
statistical minority. But our very knowledge of this statistic preserves the
integrity and elitism of this institution, whilst the drive to provide for the
needs of all beings would accommodate our egalitarian yearnings. If need be, I
could develop my theory further, in accordance not only with my PREFERENCE
(which is all that the Emotivist Status Quo affords us) but with my own NEEDS
and RIGHTS, which apply in a Universal framework:
1. Partners
should have total control over each other’s dress and body.
2. Candidates
may be exempt from selection for mating if they are virginal, lead lives of
hermitage, or have proven celibate for an extended period of recent time.
3. Candidates
for partnership must have maintained an ongoing dialogue with one an other in
order to claim the Other as a Right.
I will protect myself in this
way as one of the Rational Few, and by extension I protect not only other
members of this Elite Minority, but all beings, affording conscientious people
an ideal to strive towards that could be the adventure of a lifetime, and that
will probably take that long for most. In so doing I assert the integrity to
Pam Beasley, who might come from a more privileged position but speaks in
solidarity with me when she owns her own, true voice and inalienable human
value.
No one wants to date me. So I
need not worry about candidacy. Even if I were chosen by someone who was
revolting to me, and whom I could not alter in my image, I could still opt out
of the partnership by appealing to my own virginity. My curse would be the
blessing it was meant to be, and it would be a passion that would burn to its
own destruction only when I chose someone worthy of me. And all others who
suffer as I have would be avenged for the abuse they suffered at the hands of
narcissists.
Only then will the duality of
alpha and beta dissolve, for the only people “disadvantaged” would be the
whores in a position of privilege. They would be beautified in virtue even as
they beautify the willing virgins who are all too eager to be molded into the
perfect physical form. Being told how to dress and eat is only bad if you fear
that it won’t work. With a promise, all is possible. And they would no longer
be able to escape into their impermissible sexual lives. If I do not consent to
it, it is rape, even if the person who is infiltrated is not formally my own
body. Her personhood renders her an extension of myself. And such is Order and
Humanity. My ethic would put an end to sexual deviance and jealousy. It would
ensure that only the celibate are exempt, and the virgins will rule once again,
until by force of nature and passion they surrender inevitably their birthright
to the next willing lover. Sex will no longer be a privileged activity. It
would no longer function as a bourgeois escape from the reality of the world’s
woes. It would no longer enable conflict without consent and the destruction of
our human freedoms to live in Utopia. And it would never serve the narcissist
by either these or any other of the avenues and gutters that such filth
inhabits.
They will have to give it all
up to those who have none. And those alone who have none would be protected. For
they were all ways alone in both suffering and virtue.
On that day, “entitlement”
will become again what it truly meant.
And Jim will all ways find his
Pam.
Dm.A.A.
