The Psychopath Koan

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.)

WW: Autumn colours

(Rubus ursinus, or tripwire blackberry, is one of the few North Coast natives that put on the dog for autumn. What we lack in quantity we make up in quality.)

The Mountain Wins Again

I recently happened upon an interesting moment in Season 6, Episode 4, of Gimlet Media's Startup podcast. (Transcript here; download podcast from iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.)

At issue is Jia Ruhan, a Chinese opera singer groomed to become her country's Céline Dion, with hopes she would put it on the international pop music map. Things didn't work out – such outcomes are hard to plan – and now she lives in self-imposed seclusion, having heeded a spiritual call.

At one point the interviewer asks:

"So as a kid, at first you wanted to be a dancer and then a musical star. Then the government has this goal to make you like a global star. What do you want to be now?"

To which Jia replies:

"I want to be a hermit. Truly, exactly, I really want to be a hermit."

A statement of which the young American reporter appears entirely to miss the import. Her voice takes a quizzical tone, as if Jia were joking. The interviewer then exposits:

"After Ruhan left the [pop music] project, she went through some big life changes. She made another album on her own, but after that, she realized she was burnt out and needed a break. She got really into Buddhism and silent meditation. Our two-hour phone call was the longest conversation she’d had in six months. So the state-backed pop star who was supposed to help China become cool… for now, she wants to be a hermit."

That last line is delivered with an ironic inflection, as if Jia had silently added "... or whatever."

I like this podcast. And nobody can know everything. But in this case, the production team dropped the ball. Jia Ruhan comes from a nation with a millennia-old continuing tradition of literal hermits: individuals who retreat to the Zhongnan Mountains to practice eremitical monasticism.

So she wasn't being cute when she referred to herself as a hermit. In point of fact, she aspires, or at least wishes, to be a hermit nun: a monastic practicing alone, under her own rule, almost certainly in the Zhongnans.

I had to smile at the reporter's reaction. It's a true cross-cultural miscue, turning on the fact that Anglophones currently use the word "hermit" pejoratively. ("Don't be such a hermit! Come out and talk to our guests!") In fact, we've used the term sardonically for so long that many of us can no longer define it; for most, it's become a synonym for recluse.

Which doesn't actually bother me. But I do get a little frosted when the Western Zen establishment calls hermits fraudulent and heretical – when not flat-out calling us extinct. Zenners should know better. Or hey, maybe just practice their religion.

Interested parties may wish to consult Assignment Asia: A modern-day hermit in China. It may be a bit precious, but that's to be expected from a government production.

It does seem that if a Communist dictatorship can accept, and even boast, the ur-monks in its midst, it's not too much to ask the rakusu set to back down a peg.

Anyway, I nodded while listening to Jia Ruhan talk about her ambitions. To say I totally get it would be an understatement.

Peaceful path, sister.


(Panel from Fan Kuan's Travellers Among Mountains and Streams courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taibei, and Wikimedia Commons.)

WW: Six-legged seastar

(This is good old Henricia leviuscula, the blood star, but with an experimental enhancement. Happens sometimes. Reminds you how elementary the genetic situation is in this ancient phylum.)

Good Poem: Deteriorata

Back in the 70s, a spoken-word performance of Desiderata became a sensation in North America. Soon everyone from Pierre Trudeau to Mr. Spock was quoting it.

By the 80s, Max Ehrmann's poem had become a mainstay of the New Age movement, which grew out of the less-profitable hippy movement, which also begat the contemporary Western Zen establishment.

Let's be clear: Desiderata contains strong statements of solid (if unintentional) Zen value. I like it. But when you start to see it framed in school administrators' offices, you've officially reached peak schlock.

Which is why when I heard National Lampoon's response I immediately knew I'd found a personal anthem. The fact that it follows the exact tone and metre of Les Crane's rather Uppish With People 1971 hit record only amplifies the exponential awesomeness.

The video above is a bit of a throwaway, but hey, it was either that or my 40-year-old Dr. Demento mix tape. I recommend you play the audio and ignore the visuals.

You don't have to get into a lotus position as well, but it couldn't hurt.

And remember, brothers and sisters: it could only be worse in Milwaukee.

WW: Day's end

WW: Everybody loves the zafu

(First the cat, now the dog.)