The above quote from singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard is a reminder to me that I have much for which to be grateful, including painful lessons learned along the way.
One downside of having time on one's hands is the old saw, attributed to both St. Jerome and Chaucer that "idle hands are the devil's workshop/playthings" for me the idleness is not necessarily in my hands but in the rabbit hole that is YouTube where a VERY powerful algorithm has figured out that I like Golf, OU Football, lists of odd or unusual things, and self-help/psych videos.
In my leisurely scanning of the above items I have come across some very interesting content about sociopaths and narcissists. While I am no psychologist or psychiatrist, I am enough of an observer of human behavior to realize that I have spent time with three sociopaths and one definite narcissist in my professional life. One of the sociopaths has actually been helpful to me, as I have never been a target or manipulated, but I have seen and heard some of the vitriol directed at others, the incredible vindictiveness, and the verbal abuse. Maybe seen is not the correct term as I have not observed it, but have been told by the individual in question of their verbal destruction of another. The switching between charm and aggression is startling. The other two sociopaths in my professional life have been much more harmful and hurtful to me.
Neither of these two individuals are capable of empathy, both are liars and manipulators, in my amateur analysis they appear to has anti-social personality disorder. Both seem to have experienced, or at least made up, tragic backstories offered to elicit sympathy. Once sympathy is shown, it is perceived as weakness and now it is manipulated and abused. Both appear to be absent any empathy, both blame others for their shortcomings, and oddly both are misogynistic. I'll leave their gender to the reader to infer. Both caused me personal pain that I finally came to realize was allowing them to continue to bother me. I've forgiven them. I'll never do anything to help them, but as has been said before, and better by the Buddha “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." I can't be that guy.
A supervisor many years ago told me that I was a "very nice man" and that helped me in my career, but it could also be a shortcoming in some situations. As the president of the college in Pennsylvania, I was at what can only be called a hostile editorial board meeting when one of the members said "you haven't done anything" . My niceness was stripped away and I nearly jumped the table to throttle the guy. My chief of staff grabbed me by the arm to stop me as I said "I take umbrage at that", "we have graduated students and placed students in jobs and transfer to other institutions". The editor later mocked me in the paper saying that "Nairn had taken 'umbrage' to statements made by the board". I had to let it go but I was very tempted to send a letter saying a newspaper man ought to know the word since he obviously confused it with umbrellas...but I digress.
Tonight in my readings across the web I came across an article that wrote about empathy in the workplace as healthy for organizations and a good leadership practice. As I have written time and again, kindness, empathy, forgiveness are virtues to which we can all aspire.
OK, I can accept that I am nice, strength or weakness, virtue or vice, I am, or try to be. So now I'll be "not nice". The three aforementioned sociopaths have all been visited by karma, or "bad juju" as a former colleague called. The narcissist, about whom I have not gone to any detail, is now in prison for murder. I had spent a lot of time with this person and knew there was something unsettling, as my carpenter father would have called "half a bubble off" about them, but I could never have foreseen what eventually happened.
As I said earlier, all of this knowledge from a few YouTube videos.
Maybe I should hang out my shingle?
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