TRANSCRIPT
So I’m in the mood for making a video that I think will not be too popular. The idea that humanity, human beings as a species, all eight billion of us, or however many they are, when you combine us all together and look at us as one species, and you were going to diagnose that species, I think a good argument could be made that Homo sapiens as a whole, as one being, is a sociopath. Basically, as a whole, our species, the combined total of our behavior and action and psychology and mentality, is that of a sociopath. Destructive, hurtful, harmful to the planet, harmful to each other, violating, going out into the world and exploiting nature. Even that ancient dictum from the Bible, you know, go out and exploit nature. Well, exploiting, it’s like that’s what humanity has done to the nth degree.
I mean, I travel a lot around the world, and I notice the only places that humans really don’t colonize are the places that we can’t get our hands on. It’s hard to colonize the tallest mountains. We still try to do that, and we can’t colonize the oceans too well. And the bottoms of the oceans especially, we can’t take advantage of that. Oh, we would if we could, but we just haven’t figured out how to exploit those parts of the world. Well, what do we do with the oceans if we can’t exploit it? The least we can do is use it as a giant sewer system, a giant trash bucket where we throw all our garbage and our plastics and our fertilizers and our waste and our toxic chemicals. We behave toward the Earth like a sociopath behaves towards his or her victims.
Something I also see, and I want to make clear, on an individual level, so many people are beautiful, good, kind, have so much potential, live in many ways youthful and beautiful lives. Even people who are really harmful in many ways, I think everybody, everybody from what I’ve seen, people even who are called sociopaths, people who have told me that they are sociopaths, underneath it all, underneath all of that, they have a core of beauty. A sociopath is just a very, very brutalized, hurt, traumatized person who is replicating his or her own history of trauma on others. That’s what a sociopath is, and that’s what humanity is as a whole.
But then I think of what is the individual responsibility of each of us, because we’re all contributing to it. I know people who say, “Oh, I don’t eat meat, and I don’t do XYZ, and I don’t drive a car, and I don’t travel, and I don’t take airplanes, and I didn’t do this and do that, and I didn’t have kids.” Some of these things I’ve, you know, chosen not to do myself, and they say, therefore, I don’t take responsibility for how horrible humanity is as a whole. But I say there’s no escaping it. At some level, we’re all responsible. Even the people who live the most clean lives, we all eat something. The food we eat comes from somewhere, some land that has been exploited along the way, some land where nature can’t live, some land that we have used, we have taken over to out-compete other things.
It’s like I just think this is the humble side. I think of myself that says I’m part of this species. I’m an intrinsic part of this species. There’s no way to escape it. And then I’ve heard some people say the only ethical way to live is to kill yourself, remove yourself from life. I don’t agree with that. This is what makes it so complex. And the reason I don’t agree with people killing themselves, even if they think it’s for the ethical reason to, you know, to take one more human out of the world, is that killing oneself, when people kill themselves, it traumatizes others. Somebody loves everybody. Any suicide traumatizes the people around them, traumatizes the people who find this person. Everyone. And some people say, “I think they feel so disconnected from the world, and they feel so unseen and unloved by everyone that they say my death will not traumatize anyone.” Well, I’ve never seen that to be the case. Someone always gets traumatized by a suicide, and sometimes a suicide traumatizes a lot of people horribly and deeply, and that trauma can ripple out profoundly.
So no, causing trauma does not heal sociopathy of the species. It actually creates more problems. That’s why I negate that argument profoundly. I mean, I do my best. I chose not to have children, and I try to live a relatively healthy life in some way. But I think the best contribution that I make, and I try to make it as best I can, is to heal my own traumas, become a more healthy person, a more self-actualized person, a person who has less traumatized and who does my best to spread this message. To use my camera that’s constructed of metal and plastic and toxic things, and uses my computer, my for editing, that’s made of toxic rare chemicals that have caused more damage to the world. I try to use these toxic things to share my message, to mitigate my part in our sociopathic species for good, to try to balance it out as best I can.
I mean, not an easy video, certainly an easy video to criticize me because I’m acknowledging my part. I see it all the time. I think I know it. There is no way for us to escape this. I feel good that I didn’t have children in this crazy modern era, that I didn’t create an innocent child who would somehow contribute to this mess. My contribution, though, is to take the hurt and wounded child in myself and to try to heal him, to make him more mature and developed, to become more aware, more humble, more honest about what I see, what I know, and to use my strength, the voice that has come back. I was a voiceless little boy who couldn’t speak, who was beholden to my traumatizers, my parents, my society, who had to play the game, fit in, give the right answers. And the more strong I’ve become, the more embodied in my true self, the more I have healed those wounds, the more my voice, yes, has come back, and I can speak.
I can use this platform and whatever other platforms I have on the Internet or out in real life, direct face to face with humans that I meet, to share what I see, to take the risk to share what I know and what I have learned. But overall, I see our species as such a sociopath, a creepy species, a species that if it is going to have any hope of learning to live more in balance with the world is going to have to learn how to heal its sociopathy at a grand level. And I think this is a big part of why I made that video I made some years back saying sociopaths can heal. I did my best to create a little roadmap for how an individual person who is able to acknowledge the sociopathy within him or herself can heal.
I mean, so many people in the world say sociopaths can’t heal, forget them, get rid of them, put them in jail, forget about them, just they’re done. Once they’re a sociopath, they’re always a sociopath. And I think, oh, what a horrible message, especially in light of how I see our whole species is a reflection of this diagnosis. And if it’s true that nobody can heal them, we might as well hang it up as a species. And that’s another reason I think actually we need to learn how to help foster the healing of individual people who are labeled sociopaths. Nowadays, in the modern mental health system, certainly in the legal system, the criminal justice system, our attitude as a society is to take these people who are called sociopaths and get rid of them, push them out, shun them, put them in jail, lock them away, put them in solitary confinement, get rid of them, even sometimes literally physically kill them, remove their lives. Life would be better without them. But it’s not true. It’s wrong.
We have to learn how to create a society, create systems of a society that help people heal from this part of themselves. And actually, those people who are called sociopaths, a word that I don’t like pinning on people because I hate that ugly word, but let’s just say it exists. Those people who have healed to one degree or other from their sociopathy, those people are actually role models, and those people can teach us.
As a species, how to heal? We have to honor those people and listen to those people. We need to give our best energy, our time, and our thought, not to exploit the world more, but to help the exploited people who became sociopaths learn how to change their ways, heal their traumas, so they can teach us as a species how to heal.
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