Taken On Trust

As humans we are capable of so much, and yet so little. Most people instinctively trust other people, particularly those who share a common background, culture and tradition. But then there are always within any society, a significant number of individuals who trust no one; these are society's sociopaths and among their number psychopaths whose often random and destructive paths wreak havoc in any community. How to adequately and sufficiently judge peoples' characters?

No one has yet written a simple manual whereby people can pick up hints to identify character traits that would mark the personality of a psychopath, someone who has, by their inability to care about the welfare of others, placed themselves at an emotional remove from the rest of society. The social compact of beneficence toward others completely eludes these pathological, emotionally vacant people. They care for nothing but their own perceived comforts and needs, absent a conscience.

The agony that these social misfits can cause to society on a small or a grand scale, can be devastating in impact, yet no one is immune to becoming a victim, simply because we are collectively innocent, as opposed to the utterly blank depravity of those without conscience. There are several Greenpans in the United States, one whose first name is Alan, and who headed the Federal Reserve, now seen as culpably responsible through lack of foresight for the global meltdown.

The other is a developmental psychologist named Stephen Greenspan who wrote "Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It", writing knowledgeably about peoples' propensity to trust and in the process, get dreadfully stung. To his chagrin, despite his academic and professional credentials, he failed to follow his own advice, and has become yet another victim of a notably notorious sociopath, Bernard Madoff. Through a kind of social mentoring, a social 'trust' called word-of-mouth assurance.

The collapse of the U.S. - and global - financial market, and the additional spectacular loss of $50-billion of investment funds entrusted to the tender care of a morally sterile money manager, reflect one and the same circumstances. People in places of trust who made little to no effort to ensure that their machinations of financial instruments would have no victims - let alone on the grand scale seen today. They played the game their way, relying on opaqueness to mask their unsupportable gains, through peoples' trust in them.

In the greater scheme of things, one could ask, what is the more formidably unfortunate fate; to lose one's financial stability, or one's life and that of loved ones through the misadventure of trusting too freely and unquestioningly. A book-end to the global financial collapse and the following Madoff revelations, both intertwined in levels of manipulative malfeasance, each on its own, and then in combination wreaking world wide crises of financial insecurity, there is another example of human psychosis.

Just one of many that occur, when enraged men or women, but most often men, undertake to wreak personal revenge on the world around them, by targeting and eliminating the lives of those who somehow moved close to them and were singed as a a result. The result of which, in the short term, those burnt by close association, disassociated themselves, earning the violently bitter enmity of a psychopath whose further actions would spell extermination of those who spurned him.

It starts out innocently enough, with a friend of a friend introducing an acquaintance to a potential date. People are always trying to accommodate and to accomplish a ritual of matching unattached males to available females; another human instinct informed by human compassion. In this particular instance, a match, as often happens, ensued, and a single mother of three enjoyed a two-year courtship with a man she had been introduced to, and they lived cordially together for an entire two years of less than bliss.

Many personal traits are slowly revealed when living in close physical and psychological proximity to another person. Pertinent bits of data that, had they been known previously, might have prevented a woman from committing to a relationship. Her husband, she discovered, had once long ago had an affair with another woman, which produced a physically disabled child. As men often do, her husband moved on, did not commit to supporting the child or its mother, let alone binding emotionally with either.

Yet he unflinchingly used the child he had left behind as an income-tax dependent. When his wife discovered this unsavoury, truly unpalatable dimension to her husband, she realized the calibre of the person she had exposed and twinned her future to, and in the process her children, as well. A bitter separation ensued with a divorce to settle. The husband lost his job at Northrop Grumman Corp. where he had laid unsupportable claim to a master's degree from University of Southern California on his profile with the company.

This was the man who, on Christmas Eve, dressed in a Santa Claus outfit and fitted out with three handguns and a canister of flammable liquid, visited the home of his former wife's parents where a party was taking place. The eight-year-old child who answered the doorbell was shot directly in the face with a semi-automatic. Other revellers were shot, the flammable liquid distributed and the house set aflame. Among the nine people killed was the 17-year-old son of the friend who had introduced the murderer to his wife, Sylvia.

The killer, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, drove to his brother's house where he committed suicide. His plan had gone slightly awry; he had meant to leave for a flight to Canada directly following his murder spree, with $17,000 in cash, but suffering unanticipated burns from the fire, took his life instead. Not before booby-trapping his rental care with a home-made bomb. Exhibiting a hatred so intense that he planned to kill as many people as possible, including anyone who might happen to retrieve the car.

This is just a discrete example of the kind of dread misery people in all their innocence can visit upon themselves in the act of surrendering to the very human impulse of trusting and caring for others. Although these are discordant notes in human society, hardly representative of most peoples' actions and emotional disorders, their very grimness and the toll they take on the human psyche spreads in a pool of emotional disorder far wider than their immediate victims.

Solution? There is none. Hope? There is an entire universe of more emotionally fulfilling, life-accommodating stories that ensure we recall ourselves to the memory of those who gave us life through a long continuum of human devotion one to the other. The aberrations that so direly affect society are just that; aberrations. Normative associations express the best of humanity's potential.