Jim and Karen: A Sociopath greater than the Sum of Its Parts.

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.