I talk a lot about gratitude on this channel. It's a habit that has two not-very-subtle origins:
1. Gratitude is the wheel of morality, and
2. I'm not grateful by nature.
Prior to becoming a hermit monk, I was routinely guilty of chronic ingratitude. Which is why I'm always urging everybody else to be more grateful.
The problem with such haranguing is that it presupposes others need to be so harangued. Few things are as infuriating as being lectured by some freelance supervisor not to do a thing you were in no wise going to do in the first place. Prejudice that lacks the patience even to wait for you to fall into its trap is the worst of a filthy tribe.
But there's an even better reason not to invade this angel-forsaken terrain on a gratitude warrant: like so many other platitudes, it just wounds the wounded again. Now you're not only in pain, you're selfish and stupid besides.
Which is why I found this counsel particularly powerful:
"Please take this as permission to treat certain periods of your life as an unholy free-for-all during which you are not obligated to feel grateful."
The writer is American advice columnist Carolyn Hax, whose feature I encountered in a random newspaper.
Her correspondent was hoeing a particularly difficult row, and feeling guilty for undervaluing aspects of her existence that weren't damnably awful at that moment.
And Ms. Hax nailed it: you don't lose the right to resent intrusion on your peace just because other aspects of your life haven't.
I'm reminded of a period when I was badly injured by a calculating individual who left me crippled and broken. Even in distress I was aware that the damage had come largely with my own consent. (Pro tip: sociopaths usually lead their marks down an entangling trail of agreements, resulting in at least partial condemnation of their victims by the public when they at last drop the hammer. That's what they get off on.)
In his awareness that I could have avoided this, the abbot in my head kept disallowing my feelings of anger and offence. But at last I realised that this is what anger and offence are for. Misplaced they're a failing, but when justified, a critical source of truth and self-preservation.
I still remember the moment we talked this over, the abbot and I, and agreed that the time had come to let the dogs off the leash. What happened next is a tale for another time, but the spoiler is that I got the needed results. Taking umbrage under the watchful eye of my mindfulness practice was tremendously empowering, at a time when I felt wholly disabled, and ultimately made me a better person.
Memories that Ms. Hax's advice triggered. Because gratitude, acceptance, atonement, and other moral imperatives aren't absolutes. Like everything else, they exist within the great matrix of circumstance that comprehends everything in existence.
So there are in fact times when gratitude, like forgiveness and generosity, is not only optional, but pathological. The confines of this phenomenon are limited; no ground to stop being grateful as a whole. But for a year or two, in a specific context, till you regain a measure of largesse?
No more Goody Two-Shoes.
(Guard dog sculpture courtesy of Jason Lane; photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and a generous photgrapher.)
Three years ago almost to the day, I wrote here about the Winston Churchill Effect – that odd mass hysteria that causes whole nations to believe they remember events that never happened. In the post I related as how, as a child, I read a newspaper article about a boy my age who'd been poisoned by Hallowe'en candy laced with heroin, ostensibly given him by a psychopathic neighbour.
I'd invented that memory, sceptics assured me, on the grounds that no such crime has ever been committed, and newspapers would never report such an unsubstantiated rumour.
Well, this week I learned from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast (Episode #62: "The Strange Origins [and Stranger Persistence] of the 'Razor Blades in Candy' Myth", presented by Alex Schmidt and guest Jason Pargin), that I did in fact read such a story.
In 1970, Detroit five-year-old Kevin Toston died after eating candy that was later found to be contaminated with heroin. This was first reported in national media as a stranger-danger poisoning, before further investigation revealed that Kevin had most probably died from ingesting heroin left in his reach during a visit to his uncle. His parents, according to police, had likely sprinkled more of the stash on Kevin's Hallowe'en candy to camouflage the uncle's guilt.
I couldn't verify whether this theory came out true in court, but what's certain is that as the less-sensationalistic story dropped, so did coverage, at least beyond greater Detroit.
So I did read a real article, though several supporting facts I either added freestyle or conflated with other stories. Kevin's name, for example, was obviously not Richard. And my distinct memory of a tiny hole found in a candy bar wrapper, with the unvoiced implication that it had been injected with heroin, is similarly invented, though I'm getting a dim recollection of a schoolmate including that detail in a drugged-candy tale (either this one or another).
And though I remember that both of us were about 12 at the time, I was significantly younger, and Kevin younger still. A press photo depicts him as a laughing kindergartner in glasses, wearing a sport coat. And most significantly: he was African-American. So my memory of the two of us being similar in appearance was wildly inaccurate.
But hold the phone: on that last count, an intriguing alternative arises. In 1974 – the year I was twelve – Timothy O'Bryan really did die from eating doctored Hallowe'en candy, which was also initially reported as a stranger poisoning. And the photo run with this article shows a smiling, Cold War-coiffed Caucasian kid in a checkered collared shirt very like I used to wear.
(Note that once again, the culprit was family – statistically, far and away the most common perpetrator of child abuse. Turns out Timothy's father poured cyanide into his candy to collect on a life insurance policy.)
So one more time, no evil neighbour, and no rational excuse to deprive kids of the wonderful Hallowe'ens we cherished. But two such articles were published, and I almost certainly read them both. Over the years the two melded in my mind, and as the media seems to have done that thing where it reports accusations on Page 1 and ignores or buries vindications, I never learned that both were completely bogus.
(By the way, seeing as we're on the topic: in the podcast, Alex makes the cogent point that heroin is enormously expensive. As is cocaine, another narcotic frequently rumoured to be slipped to trick-or-treaters. One does not waste these things pranking random kids, any more than one bakes diamonds into cookies to break their teeth. And while we're up, drug addicts never give their fix away, regardless of what they're strung out on. They obsessively hoard it until every last grain is gone, then desperately scramble for more. Thus it's highly unlikely that anyone possessing these substances scatters them about for the dubious thrill of getting unseen children high.)
So the personal experience I shared in my January 2020 post is not in fact an example of the Churchill Effect. Though I've experienced others as well, the candy thing was just a pedestrian matter of scrambled memory – an extremely common cognitive glitch.
But in the cases of Kevin Tosten and Timothy O'Bryan, notwithstanding a little drift, I remembered something that actually happened.
Or to be precise, I remember actual newspaper coverage of something that never happened.
First I believed I'd read it
then I believed I didn't
and now I believe again.
(Photo courtesy of Evan Amos and Wikimedia Commons.)
We Buddhists like to think nobody wants to be evil. We prefer to imagine that evil is learned, a product of environment, and not in anyone's true nature. It's one of the Buddha's foundational teachings: all sentient being progress through multiple migrations to eventual enlightenment.
Sadly, research has confirmed that it's not always so. Psychopaths – individuals born without bodhisattva nature – are all too real. In fact, we now have the technology to identify precisely which circuits in their brains aren't firing, under what circumstances, and map it reliably.
In other words, these people are born with a physical, irreversible intellectual dysfunction, the medical (but not at all the moral) equivalent of Down's Syndrome or FAS. They lack the fundamental faculty of human decency.
And they're not even rare. Researchers suggest 3% of us suffer from this condition. (Or more accurately, the rest of us suffer from it.) That puts one in every classroom, one on every bus, one or more in most businesses, government offices, political caucuses, and religious communities.
And I suspect that number's low. From my vantage, psychopathy is certainly a spectrum, like autism. If 3% of us are outright monsters – serial killers, torturers, financial predators – many more are apologists and opportunists, profiting from serendipitous weaknesses, getting off on less theatrical violence. But whether in whole or in context, none are biologically capable of conscience.
The Buddha didn't know that. The Ancestors didn't know that. But we know that.
So, what do we do?
(Photo courtesy of John Snape and Wikimedia Commons.)
