I guarantee there is someone in your life that needs you to read articles like this. Even if you don't necessarily agree with it, at least read it, and if you really and truly are someone who needs to read it, it's pretty certain you'll passionately disagree and even take offense to the notion it propounds. That person who needs you to read it may be your more moderate or unreformed liberal parents and siblings who perceive that your radicalization is cutting them out of your lives, or maybe a friend whose good intentions and very character you've begun to doubt because they don't see the dire necessity of what you see, or that guy on social media who finds it important enough to broadcast his disagreeable opinions so often that you occasionally wonder if he's a narcissist. And he sometimes wonders that himself, out loud no less....
But there is now statistical evidence that woke intolerance is related to what psychologists refer to as the 'dark triad' of personality disorders, exactly the same as the alt-right.
That accusation sounds so serious that it's bound to be misunderstood, and I do wonder if this article overstates the case. Because what most people don't understand is that almost everyone lives some episodes of their lives within the 'dark triad,' acting like the embodiment of the narcissistic or psychopathic or manipulative type which in their sensible moments they revile. What brings the vast majority of people to the moments they live within the 'dark triad' is not an innate personality disorder, but the damage which the wear and tear of life circumstance does to people, who then convince themselves that life can't get any worse, when life most certainly can, does, and as life is sometimes just that cruel, the worst episodes of life are often self-generated.
Why is it, over and over again, that people who are obviously innately good and well meaning convince themselves to become fascists and Marxists, Nazis and Stalinists, Jacobins and Bonapartists, vulture capitalist libertarians and Corbynite socialists, phalangists and jihadists, in thrall to either critical theory and neoconservative theory, or join cults both Christian and pagan, and now turn into both alt-rightists and social justice intersectionalists? There are certainly some people who respond to these kinds of radicalism because they need outlets for innate defects of character, but the vast majority simply become convinced over time that the world's in such a dangerous and damaged state that life itself is a boil needing to be lanced, and consequently become the world's foremost dangers themselves.
The horrors of people who unrepentantly do wrong will always be with us, but part of why they're so terrifying is because they're rare. We know they always exist, but we usually have very little evidence as to which among us they are. It so obviously happens that our President is one of them, but the people who make up his base of support, as make up the support of every psychopath, are not psychopaths themselves, they're usually the opposite of psychopaths: naive idealists so eager to do good that they rarely pause to contemplate what's good and what's evil. They're often Christians utterly committed to their movement who believe in love and forgiveness and justice (remind you of anyone?), and so naively idealistic are they that a psychopath can easily convince them that the true psychopaths are those who oppose him. Psychopaths always thrive in the idealism of naive radicals, because when people are convinced that the rest of the world is truly that evil, they can be convinced much more easily to fight evil with evil.
A bad person is dangerous, but good people who do bad and convince themselves that bad is good are exponentially more dangerous.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great dissident in the Soviet Union, is himself a great example of how flawed people and thinkers can still do enormous good in the world. On the one hand, he was as responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union as any one person and god alone knows how many millions of lives he saved for the future, on the other hand, he was clearly a kind of a Russian alt-rightist whose ideology led to our current predicament with Russia. People are complicated, heroes are even more complicated, and contrary to fashionable opinion heroes are still people who acted heroically in spite of whatever else they've done, but Solzhenitsyn put the problem as well as anyone ever has in history:
“Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.”
The Macbeths and Iagos of the world are relatively rare, what is not rare is the Hamlets, the Lears, the Othellos, the Regans and Gonerils, the Shylocks, flawed people who would much rather do the right thing, but who become convinced that the circumstances of life around them are so dire that they do things they would ordinarily find deeply troubling, and convince themselves that what they do is morally right. And easiest way to convince yourself that wrong is right and right is wrong is to subscribe to a pre-digested ideology that tells you exactly how the world is, and therefore removes the burden of doing your own thinking, all the while convincing you that you're thinking more deeply than you ever have before.
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