TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the sociopathy of everyday life. The very little things that are hostile against society, hostile against other people, hostile against the world that people do—maybe regular people, everyday average people. The little things that nobody notices, nobody sees, that aren’t directly done against an individual, that maybe is just part of even normal human behavior. Maybe a lot of normal people even do these little sociopathic acts.
What am I talking about? Well, I can give a lot of examples, but one I think that jumps out at me the most is sitting in a public desk somewhere or sitting in a public seat and noticing right in front of me, underneath the desk or underneath the feet in front of me, there’s a piece of gum stuck there. Or feeling under a chair and realizing that someone has stuck a piece of used chewing gum under the chair, under the desk. And sometimes for me, because I’m a tall guy with long legs, I’ll put my knee up and my knee will go into someone else’s chewed gum. And I think, who does that? Who are the people who do that? And yet all over the world, people do that.
You just can walk along the sidewalk in any city—well, maybe except Singapore. I think we’re chewing gum maybe illegal, that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve never been there. But like all over New York City, you see these little black splotches of gum that’s been thrown down over the months and years and decades. And it’s like, who throws chewing gum on the street when they’re done with it? You know somebody’s going to step on it. You know it’s going to get on the bottom of someone’s shoe and tread all over the place. And to me, it’s like a little indication of someone who is doing a hostile act. So that’s one example.
And then I think, well, just the other day I was walking in the forest on a trail, and I noticed this beautiful forest. And it seems to be so idyllic, and no people here at all. And it’s quiet, and I can hear crickets and birds and crows. And I can hear a squirrel throwing little acorn parts out of a tree, and I can hear the wind, and I can see the sun on my face. And then I see a little tree stump with a hole in it, and I look in that hole just out of curiosity. Maybe there’s an animal in there. And I could see somebody put garbage in that hole—a Snickers bar wrapper and some other things. And it looked like a few different people had done it.
And then I realized that’s so common. I see it in New York City all the time. It’s like, oh, there’s a little hole in the side of a building. There’s a hole in a light post. Someone puts something on the ground, and always there’s somebody who’s stuffing garbage in it. They know no one’s ever going to come and clean this up. No one’s ever going to come and pick it up. But I think of that. I think it was like, who does that? Why did they do such a thing?
I think of other things, simple things. It’s like go into a public restroom—the toilet. It’s, let’s say, a unisex bathroom, a unisex toilet for men and for women. The toilet seat is down, and somebody has peed all over the toilet seat. Or multiple people have peed all over the toilet seat. Some guys have done this, and it’s like, why didn’t they lift the toilet seat? Why didn’t they use their shoe or a Kleenex? There’s toilet paper there. Why didn’t they lift it up and pee in it and then maybe put it down? Or at least just leave the top up? Something like that. But they peed all over the toilet seat.
And everybody knows what it’s like to really have to go to the toilet and make a bowel movement. And you desperately have to go, and you run into a bathroom, and there’s the toilet seat down. And you go to sit on it, and there’s pee all over, and you actually have to clean it up before you sit down. Or worse yet, it’s dark, and you don’t see the pee, and you sit in it, and you get pee all over yourself. Well, disgusting, but I’ve done it. And you think, who just peed on the seat? And everybody, I think everybody, many people at least, have had something along the lines happen to them where they have to clean up after somebody or they sit in it. Everybody knows what that’s like.
And yet these same people who know what it’s like, they’re peeing on the seat. Well, what goes into someone doing these things? And what I think it is—this is just my analysis from all these years of thinking about this—the gum on the bottom. And I think, who does that? First of all, it’s people who are very hostile. They’re very angry. They’re angry at the world, and they feel justified in being angry. They feel justified in taking out their rage and revenge on humanity writ large, on complete strangers. And they get a certain sense of pleasure out of this. They may not admit that it makes them feel good, but when you know people are going to be harmed by this, you know that someone’s going to sit in your piss or someone’s going to get their knee or the bottom of their shoes stuck in your gum. They know you’re going to have to see their garbage when you’re walking in a pristine environment. I believe they enjoy it. I believe at some level it gives them a sense of pleasure, and that sense of pleasure is the revenge that they’re looking for.
And who are they really committing the revenge on? Well, having to get to know people, sometimes I’ve seen people do these acts. I’ve caught people in the act. I’ve gotten to know their personalities a little bit. What I’ve seen is the people who do this are people who are wounded children. They’re angry from their child. They’re angry often at their parents for being betrayed, for having their needs not met, from having their needs thwarted, from having hostile acts perpetrated on them by people whose job it was to love them. Back when they themselves were innocents, back when they themselves did nothing wrong and were being mistreated by the people often who bore the most responsibility to love them the most but didn’t love them, didn’t nurture them. Instead, crossed them, treated them badly, shamed them, humiliated them for no reason except that those people who had power and responsibility over them were themselves traumatized, themselves angry. We’re acting out their sociopathy of everyday life on their children.
And I think so often the most common sociopathy of everyday life, the sociopathy of normal people, the stuff that happens behind the scenes, out of the public eye, in the private world happens from parents toward children. And this is ultimately where it comes from. People can do whatever they want to their children as long as it’s not so much that the law gets involved, so much that child protective services get involved. It happens in normal healthy families. Parents can do all sorts of stuff to their children. I mean, in so many places in the world, even in America, it’s legal to literally take your child over your knee when they annoy you and take your hand and hit them repeatedly. Imagine doing that to an adult who did something you didn’t like, maybe something that really even was horrible—corporal punishment. Imagine a policeman doing that to someone. It’s like goodbye, you’re going to jail now in the best of all worlds. But with children, it’s like considered a good and healthy thing.
And half the time, most of the time, the children aren’t necessarily even doing something bad. Maybe they’re just annoying the parents by existing. Or maybe the children are doing something bad, and the badness that they’re doing is a reaction to the badness that has been done to them. They’re frustrated, and they’re angry, and they’re seething with all their rage, and they act out in annoying ways or difficult ways or troubled ways because they’ve been so mistreated. And no one’s ever acknowledged how they’ve been mistreated. No one’s ever helped them work it out and empathize with them and help them heal their pain and their real trauma. Instead, they’re acting it out, and the reaction by the adult world is to punish them even more, and that’s considered so often good parenting.
See, these children grow up and they still hold rage. This is actually considered normal, which is why I think this sociopathy of everyday life is often so, so normal. And it’s normal people that are sticking the gum under the seat, doing it when no one’s looking. The normal people who are breaking the rules, acting it out, displacing it on the world, displacing it against people who bear no responsibility. It’s really a replication of their childhood trauma. Someone who was guilty victimized them when they were innocent, and now that they are going to turn around in replication to try to undo and make up for in their mind, it really doesn’t do anything to heal the problem.
Which is why, so being a sociopath, even in a mild way, in an everyday way, or an extreme way, does nothing to help someone heal. It’s like an addiction. It makes them feel good for a moment, but in the long run, it does nothing to help. It does nothing to really make up for what happened. But people, well, they take what was done to them and they do it to others. And in a way, it kind of, it’s like false karma. Do unto others what they did to me, as opposed to real karma, real healthy karma, good loving karma, which is figure out how to heal, figure out how to do good, and then pass on this good to others.
The golden rule: do unto others as I would have others do unto me, versus the poison rule, which is do unto others the nasty things that were done to me. And I think this is really what underlies this sociopathy of everyday life. You.