As our former president negotiates his way through a fourth set of indictments it seems pertinent to talk about why it hasn’t had much of an effect on his base. In point of fact, he is still the odds on favorite to win the Republican nomination. The concept might seem foreign to most of us, but I have a working theory. Simply put, most of us think small. I could get into advanced psychology here, but suffice it to say this gets into moral and ethical development. Essentially, most observers see moral development in three stages. The early childhood stage has people simply meeting their needs and ignoring moral norms. In early childhood we wouldn’t even know those norms anyway. Most things exist as an extension of self. So, concepts like the self-determination of other people or family pets are foreign concepts.

When we enter adolescence we start moving to the second or third stage depending on how much we develop as people. We recognize the rules and norms of society and we follow them because we are afraid of what will happen if we don’t. That’s the second stage. A good chunk of the population never gets past this point and as long as we get to this point then society functions smoothly. The third stage involved us developing our own moral and ethical code that can exist simultaneously with the norms of society. These norms are usually beyond that of society and move us to a higher moral plain. It is more the question of what we do when the world isn’t watching.

It is this paradigm that has many Americans trapped in his moment. It is the belief that someone that might be guilty of the same kind of nepotism that we see in our walks of life is somehow morally equivalent to someone that has brazenly broken the law at every turn. Ultimately, the same is true for all of these indictments. It all seems too much. No one could be that horrible. So, it immediately seems like a double standard. We want to indict the other guy because we “know” he must be doing the small stuff. If your mind will not allow you to do the big stuff then it will have difficulty recognizing the big stuff that other people are doing.

Essentially we are watching a Discovery True Crime documentary before our very eyes. One of my favorites involves the “monsters” in our own home. We didn’t think they could do it, but there were signs. Signs. In each and every episode the living victims talk about how they saw some horrible things, but couldn’t believe that the monster would do THAT. The audience is frantically shouting, “get out now. Leave. Hurry and don’t look back.” Yet, it never seems to happen. Those willing to do the big are monsters. We elected a monster in 2016. He will keep doing these things. He has been indicted in four different jurisdictions. He was found civilly liable for sexual assault in a fifth jurisdiction. He is overtly threatening judges, lawyers, and witnesses. He is calling on his supporters to fight in his name. He isn’t hinting at it anymore. Go big or go home. When someone tells you who they really are you have to believe them.

Some people are more fascinated with evil than others. The biggest rage in the office is the series “Dahmer” on Netflix. Everyone has been trying to get me to watch, but I’d be watching solo at home. I don’t necessarily want to see evil or watch it described, but the idea of sociopaths and psychopaths interests me as someone that has a masters in counseling and has dabbled in some abnormal psychology.

I picked up a book at Barnes and Noble a few weeks ago and was finally able to crack it open. Mind you, I haven’t finished it but I found Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen to be a fascinating read so far. The biggest breakthrough was in the terminology itself. He doesn’t use terms like good and evil. Instead he talked about empathy. Some people have a lot of it and some people have a little or zero real empathy.

As someone interested in mental health, this revelation brings a number of questions that I hope he has answers for. For instance, is empathy something innate that some people simply lack or is it something learned from our environment? For instance, he was able to show different parts of the brain and explain what was happening on a physiological level when someone’s empathy was impaired. Can we successfully teach empathy? Can we develop an empathy pill for those that have biological reasons for a lack of empathy?

What strikes me most of all is that terms like “good” and “evil” come with significant value judgments attached. Empathy can be measured. We may not have a perfect measurement, but we can certainly do better than “evil”. One can say that they are doing something for the good of mankind and yet conduct themselves without a shred of human empathy.

Cohen described it like a spotlight. Those that have empathy have two or more spotlights. One is on them and their thoughts and needs. The other spotlight(s) are on others and their thoughts and needs. Those with zero to no empathy have only one spotlight. There are times in all of our lives when we are down to one spotlight. It happens. Something horrible happens or we feel more vulnerable for one reason or another. However, that condition is just temporary. When our lives stabilize or the crisis abates then our empathy returns to normal.

Yet, what we are seeing is an increasing amount of people that are stuck on one spotlight. Again, I wish I knew whether this was learned behavior or somehow organic. What I do know is that this is a more substantial description of potentially dangerous people than simply calling them evil. After all, a person with a single spotlight can seem good as long as their ends seem in line with everyone else’s. When their interests and the interests of others collide then watch out. Until we can get a pill at the local pharmacy we need to make sure we don’t give those folks too much power.