How does the simple argument differ from the threat?
The former merely makes the claim that something is so, and the latter promises to personally affect – or try to affect – some negative or aversive outcome.
What sort of personal psychology makes an individual relatively more prone to the issuance of threats (toward others)? It does not require a rare perspicacity or advanced degrees in psychology to discern that the tendency to resort to threats is not atypically consequent to feelings of insecurity in the issuer of the threat himself/herself.
And what might cause one person to feel more insecure than another? There can be myriad pangs and inducements. There is sometimes, of course, the sense that one inhabits a station, status, privilege or providential renown that has been got by chance, or otherwise not deservingly. Whenever a person becomes aware that he or she lives in a reality distinct and above the unfortunate and the commonplace, that person is obliged to psychologically reconcile the fact within his or her own head.
In 1984, I was a limousine driver in Orange County California, a part of the Los Angeles megalopolis. One afternoon I was assigned to pick up a couple at their very spacious, upscale suburban home. I had the opportunity to briefly chat with the man who had ordered this luxurious service for himself and his wife. He told that he was a manager at a large and prosperous bank. He said his life had rolled along so comfortably and agreeably that he’d begun to experience a lot of psychic guilt. Why, he thought to himself, have I been blessed with so much when so many millions have so little, while so many in this country have so little to afford them any hope? Why should I be so lucky when so many others are not? The question seemed more a striving fatuously at absolution than the genuine want of an answer. After a ten minute conversation we were on our way, without a care in the world.
Watching TV in the late 1980s, I saw a thirty-minute journalistic profile of music industry superstar Barbara Streisand. Standing astride the front gate of her palatial home in Bel-Air California, she confided candidly that she felt “scared”. The journalist did not enquire into her statement very deeply, but let us do so here; we can at least venture some guesses about the source of her unease.
She was an enlightened, political liberal-progressive, and yet she knew full well that hers was the elevated stratus-cloud life of the paragon. She could mentally apprehend the tragic and shameful sufferings of countless countrymen and women – even persons easily within view – but she could not take that at-once awful and intrepid step into appreciable, proactive advocacy. She was probably “scared” of what her moral timidity might warrant or yield in some eventual eschatological sense.
Among the running fearful is also the figure of the famous and wealthy Hollywood actor Charlie Sheen. Charlie is the prodigal son of a still more famous Hollywood movie star: Martin Sheen. Charlie grew up in the joyous, devil-may-care, fantasy, the-sky’s-the-limit, upper middle class suburbs of Los Angeles, playing games of acting with his father and other neighborhood kids; some ineluctable cosmic efflux had landed him in one of the most strikingly serendipitous, adventitious lives on the planet – indeed, landing upon his worldly terminus like the touch of a kingly sword upon the shoulder of the hero, yet with all the randomness of a lightning strike. There were sometimes good fortune, and sometimes ridiculous, exceeding good fortune, and Charlie Sheen was constantly aware that his was the latter.
Charlie Sheen starred in several commercially successful movies in the 1980s and 1990s. In the first decade of this century, Charlie landed roles in two commercially successful comedy TV series, for which he was extremely well compensated. His personal life in the past fifteen years has been troubled and complicated, often apparently at the very periphery of apprehension by legal authorities for a number of illegal and at least quasi-illegal activities. In many ways he was eccentric: he extended wildly generous tips to waitresses, used several illegal drugs routinely, and paid female porn stars to have sexual relations with him (all while he was rich and famous and attractive to young women, which meant that he obviously had no need to pay women to have intimate relations). And there were also intimations and allegations of spousal abuse.
In early 2011, he dealt with his super-easy, fun, high-paying job with complete disregard – repeatedly not showing up for work and often arriving unprepared to begin following the director’s instruction (as one does when one is under the influence of a drug or alcohol, or when one is at the very apex of arrogance). He haughtily imagined that he was such an irreplaceable star that the show simply could not and would not go on without him, and that the producers of the show would bend, and bend again, to accommodate and coddle him and his spoiled-brat shenanigans. Two weeks into the nonsense, he was fired.
In order to dispel the demons playing havoc with his psychology, Charlie had come previously to the interesting and interested opinion that it was not blind, arbitrary fate that had so foreordained his fame and prosperity, but some intangible specialness that he possessed. He exercised with passion. And he engaged his ample libido – in repeated paid coition with paid prostitutes – with elan, and used legal and illegal drugs with abandon. His uber-expensive drug habit – which was paradoxically both the desert of the manifestly superior being and the effective banishing of residual guilt-demons – were the markers of his very personal effort at reconciling cognitive dissonance.
Although Charlie Sheen’s life has cleaned up in recent years, his was obviously not a making of threats toward others; in his 40s, he’d simply become a threat to himself.
And there is the story of another famous American actor, Tom Cruise. Cruise had the uncommon weal of obtaining fine lead roles in movies being made by major studios when he was in his early 20s. He was very wealthy and famous well before he turned 30. Women considered him exceedingly handsome, and Cruise began to draw the green-eyed ire of common American men. You see, a person can be admired for his talent, athleticism, fame, wealth, magnanimity and/or intellect but combine these with strong evidence that women find him spectacularly attractive and you have what we might call the Elvis syndrome: a social-psychological circumstance where a male celebrity is frequently the target of character assassination and libelous innuendo as a direct result of his having committed the cardinal sin of adding to his enviables that he is the constant recipient of female adoration. Cruise became a mark for male contempt. The news media began to treat him harshly in the years after 2000. He was noted for his self-serving religious views, and that was part of the growing popular unease with him. And there was this little non-event where he appeared on the Oprah Winfrey TV talk show and jumped up in joyful glee onto the sofa while talking about his girlfriend, Katie Holmes. Cruise was smitten, obviously in the intoxicated, unselfconscious throes of love when he jumped on Oprah’s sofa, so, it seems weirdly harsh for the media to attack him as an inconsiderate vandal for the transient act. On topic: it is worthwhile to point out that the furniture he so briefly tread upon was not actually hers; it belonged to the company that had arranged the set for the program; it was not in a home, and had not arrived from anyone’s home: it was one of the props and objects routinely used by any such TV show. Additionally, Cruise did no harm to the manufacture at all: it looked and functioned afterward precisely the way it had previously, and there were not even any dust marks where the soles of the shoes trod upon the fabric.
But, as I mentioned, Cruise had his own bit of peculiarity. He was an ardent devotee of a cultish religion called “Scientology”. The central tenets of Scientologists purport a theology that participates in the prosperity gospel. Scientology, while putatively Christian, avowedly rationalizes and justifies the vast inequalities in human fulfillment by the claim that all good fortune and benefaction, all abundance, strokes and felicity, are what an infinitely loving God intends for all his true believers. Here is a God that wants one to be precisely as selfish as he himself wants! What a great and fortuitous God that is!
Of course, Christ himself said nothing remotely of the kind. Indeed, Christ’s words, in the Four Gospels, reveal, “…the love of money is the root of all evil,” “It is easier for a camel to move through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven,” “If you want to be perfect, go sell your possessions and give to the poor,” “Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have…,” and “He who is first shall be last.”
No matter; for Scientology’s faithful, as well as other prosperity gospel “religion”, one of the most obvious evidentiary elements of godly favor is the experience of being fantastically wealthy. How is it possible that the transpicuous amplitude of God’s providence can possibly, in any way, be itself wrong? How is it possible when one has factually earned all the material wealth he or she possesses? So goes the thinking.
With the steadfastness of a corroborating faith, Cruise came to the religious conviction that God must have very sincerely and deliberately, albeit inexplicably, favored him. (And to retreat from this conviction would be to likely reintroduce the conscience demons.)
In 2016, the American electoral system awarded the presidency of the United States to a starkly unapologetic, self-aggrandizing capitalist. And, very likely, the 45th president of the United States will be far the wealthiest person to ever hold the office, and probably the nation’s first billionaire president.
The 2016 president-elect is certainly, despite all the cocky performance-bravado to the contrary, extremely insecure. He’s had to watch vigilantly and be on guard throughout his entire lifetime, lest the appearance, label or fate of the “loser” descend as a vile chimera. The new president-elect is known to issue many threats: In the 2016 campaign, he 1) threatened to cut off American financial support of NATO (an unusual position, to say the least); 2) threatened to deport millions of undocumented Latinos, including innocent children, 3) threatened to financially punish American manufacturers with fiscal sanctions (such as the loss of tax privileges) if they move jobs and production overseas; 4) threatened to use the power of the presidency to instruct his Justice Department to investigate his political opponent, with an interest in obtaining conviction, and all this consequent to vindictive political settling of scores; and 5) threatened to sue more than ten women who had come forward in October 2016 accusing him of sexual misconduct, “groping” and assault.
The president-elect is now over seventy years old. When he was a young man, his kindly father, after affording him a fine set of opportunities to attend the best American universities, extended his son a substantial “loan”. But this president-elect did not resolve his cognitive quandary of propitious birth with religion, as Cruise did. No! He instead concocted an odd morality at conspicuous variance with the familiar compassion morality of traditional American culture and with the basic and amply evident grace-filled and loving tenets of monotheism. In 2015, while beginning his campaign for the presidency, this president-elect famously stated that he disagreed with those who claim Vietnam War veteran and now-U.S. senator John McCain is (was) an American hero. McCain was captured by the enemy Vietcong in the late 1960s and held captive for years and tortured. The insensate candidate (& now president-elect) explained himself thusly: “I like people who didn’t get caught.”
Hence, to get shot down on the battlefield is to be removed from the realm of heroism. And to fearlessly give one’s life in a righteous cause is not heroism. The president-elect must be seeking a way to exonerate himself, to reason out his own masculine courageousness when his reality does not rationally afford such an assessment. One who lives his life for the transpicuous purpose of his own self-aggrandizement is not one who is regarded as heroic; such a one is merely selfish. For this vile and misanthropic president-elect, to “like people who didn’t get caught” is to like the idea that heroism can be molded to exalt himself.
What can such an outrageous statement mean? What does the remark tell us about this wealthy man’s moral scheme? Common morality regards what one thinks and steadfastly demonstrates in behavior (does, that is) as the clearest and truest indicator of one’s morality. But the real estate developer-come-president-elect and his silver spoon, convoluted morality leave one speechless. He defines the loser not as one who himself has base, mean and hateful values, but one who factually loses, anyone who is in the sufferance of loss, anyone who is unfortunate, anyone who is victimized or is reduced by the indignity consequent to any crime or wrong or misfortune. Within such a devilish scheme, one’s core character is established not by what he or she believes and does, but by caprice, improvidence, and ill-fated, star-crossed, miserable calamity. One is a loser because one’s existence is tragic. (And by such errancy, of course, it is worthwhile pointing out here that Jesus Christ himself is thence not only the “lamb of God” and the “alpha and the omega,” but also the most piteous and despicable of losers.)
Aside from his irreligion being evidently unchristian, the president-elect follows the same moral value scheme as that of the medieval Mongol Horde. The Mongols of the early thirteenth century, led by the infamous Genghis Kahn, were startlingly barbaric in their tactics. Indeed, British scholars of the late nineteenth century Victorian era often refused to describe any of the specific horrors the Mongols inflicted on the unarmed noncombatant women and children of the polities they conquered by violence, preferring the vague and sterile terms “cruel”, “ordeal”, “mean”, “nasty”, and “awful”. Apparently, the Mongols’ methods were literally unspeakable. The Mongols were assisted in their barbarism by a facilitative theology that held immediate outcomes (not behaviors!) as the most unarguable evidence of God’s approbation: the godly were simply the victorious, and that was that. The Mongol’s most esteemed belief system is easily summarized in the familiar pseudo-wisdom that “might makes right.” The actuality was the will of God. (No need to ever pray within such an irreligious ‘religion’, as God’s will had always already become manifest!)
We always believe, to some extent, that barbarians are definitively such because of their evident behavior. And we believe too that there’s something inherently disastrous and baleful in the behavior itself, that the vile behavior is a predictor of ultimate ruin, that there’s something inauspicious in the very DNA of barbarism. If “pride always comes before a fall,” surely the most reprobate barbarism comes before a fall most precipitous and ungainly. If a peace and decency orientation were (all other factors remaining unexamined, of course) relatively predictive of peaceful and decent outcomes, surely a contrapositive record of behavior is predictive of a similarly antithetical outcome.
Finally, what would it mean in the twenty-first century if the world’s most powerful and influential nation, itself unarguably a nuclear superpower, were to inauspiciously come to be led by a person who displayed the nihilistic pseudo-morality of Genghis Kahn and his Horde?
We’ll soon see.