APOLOGETIC PSYCHOLOGY: The A.B.C’s of How to Accept Being a Criminal.

APOLOGETIC PSYCHOLOGY: The A.B.C’s of How to Accept Being a Criminal.

As far as I can recall, being in the right had nothing ever to do with following the group. Whenever any group of people were given freedom, they would usually decide matters by a vote that often had little if anything to do with the moral and legal dictates put upon them by their elders and superiors. And this sort of collective deviance found its justification in the systematic criticism, by the group, of those same elders and superiors. A popular motif was of course hypocrisy: Supposing that the superiors themselves were possessed of inferior virtue? Obviously, if we only valued the Law insofar as it served US, and we observed it only out of fear of personal disadvantage, then any authority in a position of sufficient power would have not only the ability but the motive to abuse it. Did this justify the mob of miscreants that were my peers? Veritably, no: because however sketchy the execution of the Law was, its Value was what sold it for me. It was simply a matter of maturity that I came to realize that the Value of the Commodity (the Law) was less than the set of Values that it was advertised and sold for.

The Group persisted, up through high school and into several generations that I witnessed of college students. I can only presume (and in most cases have no choice but to confess) that the tendency for group hypocrisy survives in many people up through old age and even gets in bed with the extremely elderly and infirm on his or her death-bed. At that point, when one has little left to lose, what does the Law amount to, really? It can only hold as much value as the Values that it was meant to represent, and only if those Values are convincing. Obviously, as a human being who craves solidarity with other humans, I can only ultimately stake my well-being on Values which are Universal, such as Love, Compassion, Generosity, Friendship, and Loyalty. Even the principle of Individuality, according to which I retain the felt right to forego all other values in pursuit of my own, is a Universal Principle; most of us at least would DREAM of doing so successfully. That would be a Life worth living and dying for. And that is a Value the likes of which one takes gladly to the grave.

It has become fashionable to speak of “Criminal Psychology”. Like so many dangerous memes, it has even become the ominous title of a Course of Study offered at most Colleges and Universities. The term is ironical, because it implies that Criminals are in some pivotal ways different from Civilians in their very Psyches. Of course, several alarms flair off in my own, private police station (wherein some of the greatest Western minds are my own personal Deputy sheriffs) upon the contemplation of this concept.

1.    The distinction between “Criminal” and “Civilian” is purely semantic. It is a strictly verbal device used by a system in order to categorize people, arguably with the intent of Control. (Foucault.)

2.    It passes judgment upon the SOULS (Psyches) of individuals who violate a set of often arbitrary social dictates. (Nietzsche.)

But those are just the Common Sense triggers. What looms most ominous is of course in the Depths: how are criminals psychically different from civilians?

3.    Criminals are only psychologically different if they exist beyond the Fourth Stage of Moral Development (above the Law) or prior to it (below the Law). [Kohlberg.]

Of course, Kohlberg all so famously posited that MOST individuals operated at the THIRD stage of Development, just one step PRIOR (and therefore BELOW) the Law. Does this mean that most people are criminals? At some point, perhaps this was not the case, because Laws were so simple and basic that only Social Deviants would break them. But nowadays, when it is a mark of genius to know enough Law to hold up in Court, it is not unlikely that you, too, are a criminal. But then: I do not doubt that of most of my readers.

Even if not, so what? If you happen to follow the Law without KNOWING it, even to the extent that your average member of the Fourth Rung does, (which still rests, demonstrably, below most lawyers, who must by necessity operate on the fifth rung if they are to exploit loopholes in the service of their paying clients) it is not because you hold a set of VALUES but rather that you are so AVERAGE in your self-interest that the Law accommodates you. Enter again the classic group dynamics I discussed, which followed us like a long and stalking morning shadow since we were in kindergarten or even daycare. Why does the Law serve those who live BELOW it and ignore and marginalize those who live ABOVE it? Put simply: it was inherited by the Group. That’s right: the same kids who got together to prank the school by tossing peanut butter at the ceilings, or who sprayed their names on the ceilings of their respective restrooms, or who smoked, drank, and fucked in the Hotels and blamed the “snitch” who turned them in during one of her panic attacks: those are the people who help write our laws.

I know what you are thinking: what got lost in translation?

Well, as it turns out, kids remember what hypocrites their elders were, and they carry on the tradition by force of usually unconscious habit. So you get to college age and you learn how to USE and even TWIST the Law IN YOUR FAVOUR. And of course this is easiest to DO in a GROUP because a Group possesses the capacity to punish social deviance. As I have said many times before, a mob of people working in unison is capable of more EVIL than any one individual could ever dream of. They simply have a capacity that is greater than the sum of the group’s parts, which is all ready, by the nature of being multiple, greater than any one person.

So I repeat what I opened this essay with, in different words: as far as I can remember, doing the Right Thing had less to do with following the GROUP and more to do with following one’s HEART. For in a world of chaos and hypocrisy one can at least confess that the SPIRIT of the Law is good. We would like IDEALLY to operate in a world of mutual solidarity, compassion, and self-respect. And even if that is a bit too much to ask of OTHER PEOPLE, one can at least rise up above the Mass of Hypocrites and demonstrate those cardinal virtues in one’s own behavior, with one’s own self and conscience as witness. And insofar as this necessitates a certain degree of elitism in order to be effective in a degenerate age, this renders one’s own SELF one’s only true jury of peers, for one would be peerless save for the company of other deviants, who have often their own paths to follow.

So I repeat the obvious: How I feel is my only moral imperative. What others feels is no concern of mine. The only reason why your conscience should contradict mine to any effect would be if yours were more effective in serving the Universal Principles that rules and regulations were supposed to represent. And this is all but impossible, owing to two salient facts:

1.    Universal Principles are Universal. That means that, in theory, at least, any individual who is growing morally will inevitably arrive at the same fundamental conclusions over a long enough period of time, and upon arrival he will be in the company of an elite society of individuals who would all agree with him at any turn, for both his predicament and the course of action that he deems proper to take in such a predicament would be ubiquitous and unassailable.

2.    Universal Principles are Unenforceable. You can’t legislate love, police friendship, or find a loophole in loyalty. You can only take action against violations of these principles AS AN INDIVIDUAL, and beyond that your extremity is God’s Opportunity, and no mortal’s.

By saying “how I feel” to be my only imperative, I am not advocating for emotivism. Feelings ought to be informed by Reason; the development of an Individual requires certain irrational Feelings to be Refined and Transmuted. But I repeat this: that there will be no Law higher than Conscience. This does not mean that I confine myself to my own actions. On the contrary, Universal Thinking is binding upon Others because outside of the Law disappear the boundaries that isolate people. As Foucault pointed out, the Individual is in many cases a product of Power Structures. But I maintain that there is an OTHER Individuality, expressed as the Jungian Self, and distinct from what Jung called the “social unit”, who is capable of imposing Moral Order upon his surroundings. This would of course be compromising to both tyrants and parasites on both sides of the Law. The Law was only ever the formalization of Groupthink, which by its very design was a simply rudimentary way to defy arbitrary authority and to carry on a hypocritical tradition. To be GOOD has nothing to DO with following the Law; in fact, to the extent that one FORGETS THE LAW TO EXIST, except when it serves a MORAL agenda, one is the very Height of Nobility.

Our Law is what forces us to confine our Wills to our Selves. Law dictates that we can have our own behavior policed, as well as serving the policing of our neighbours’ behaviours. But it robs us of the right to police our neighbor DIRECTLY when he violates a Principle that all of us SHOULD, by definition, hold Dear, because without it all Value and Meaning would dissolve, and Life would return to Nihilistic Chaos. Law is the very ANTITHESIS of the Moral Conscience and the well-being of that elusive entity that alone can wield it: the Individual. Law forbids us to take action against those who usurp our own progress and who attack the very foundations of Human Decency that Empathy and Evolution necessitate: Love, Trust, and Freedom. And Law can only serve its impersonal function so long as it serves those who live ABOVE it and can wield it effectively; it becomes Godless and Depraved when it works only to accommodate the hypocrites BELOW.

When the Law works only to serve those who were Lawless to begin with, and who threw the Values out with the Product, the System of Law produces a breeding ground for the polar opposite of Empathy: Narcissism. The human parasite finds a nook and cranny in every legal loophole. He works as a multiple agent at every stage of Moral Development, belonging all the while, at heart, to only the most base stages that degenerates and infants alone call Home. As the Officer of the Law foregoes his own free thought to equate “Legal” with “Righteous”, his close friend the con artist thrives in that gray area that, by the very nature of the Law, the Law itself cannot oversee, for the Law is a series of Restrictions placed upon the MIND, and only an infinite Mind that is unimpinged upon by these Restrictions can fathom things like Love, Loyalty, Friendship, and Empathy. A machine can be a citizen, but it cannot be a Good Human Being. All of the devices of the Human Intellect fall short of drawing a map of the Human Heart, for the Human Heart yearns above all else to be undefined and, as such, Free.

When a wrong is committed against the Heart, it is Felt for a long time. A restriction is placed upon the Heart’s expression that the Heart must work with. In the process, the Mind must itself exercise restrictions upon the Oppressor that restricted it. Yet it will only appear identical to its Oppressor in the eyes of the Blind Law Man who, BY HIS VERY NATURE, cannot SEE the Heart, for it belongs to that Nebulous Realm that no Law or Restriction can touch, so that only its expression – its Manifestation in the World – can be restrained. And this alone is enough for the Heart, which craves confirmation in the World, to suffer inestimably, even infinitely, for it is on such a dimension that the affront is registered: in the Infinite. Thus what would have been Heaven becomes Hell, and all because Heaven on Earth was lost to Hell on Earth. Karl Popper might argue that the former is futile because it only produces the latter. But in fact the former is essential to the survival of the Heart; the latter is homicidal to impose and suicidal to accept.

Neither the con artist nor his friend the Law Officer avails himself of those Values which protect, avenge, and heal the Heart. This has been condemned to the province of religion. Cancer protects. Scorpio avenges. Pisces heals. The remaining nine prepare each of the water signs for its sacred task. Even in the realm of Western Astrology, however, this task is submerged underwater and the signs are dispossessed of their “constraining” duty and turned, by the very nature of the false freedom IMPOSED UPON THEM, into a priori suspects of manipulation, cruelty, and weakness. And some even yield to these temptations and use their God-given natures as justification!!!

The Officer protects the con artist as well as the Group that most empowers him. The con artist claims to protect both Group and Law, but he does so only to the extent that it serves himself, even if he does so at the expense of not only the Moral Universals but all so the Moral Universalist who is then framed and made to look like a con artist because he is found out to be a Criminal.

This is why Mike Ehrmentraut says to Price: “I didn’t say you were a bad guy. I said you were a criminal.” Being Good and Evil OUGHT TO, by its Nature, be our Main Concern. The Law is a mere FOOTNOTE IN that, and the psychology of the Criminal is simply one of two:

1.    Those who exploit the system for personal gain, narcissistically.

2.    Those who regard the system as just an other immoral and amoral obstacle to Goodness, empathically.

The former live below the Law. The latter live above it. And the Law serves, by its VERY NATURE, the former.

So if you had to decide to be a criminal or a civilian, which would YOU choose?

Dm.A.A.