Thread to mourn the passing of the soul of John Kerry

[TM99]

233. I see a lot of questions like this here.

I also see others here describing Assad or Kerry as being 'good' or 'evil' as if these words describe actual psychological realities of absoluteness.

As a psychologist with over 25 years of practice, I can definitely tell you that most human beings are both. Yes, we are both. And often we are unconscious to that fact. We demand trust from those around us while we lie to ourselves or others. We do good in our work day after day and yet work out the unconscious trauma's of our own sad childhood's by being very bad and even abusive in our personal relationships.

If we mature and become more mindful of the world and ourselves, we can recognize and even catch the incongruencies before they occur. We can say to ourselves, yes, I was against the Vietnam War, but now I find myself as the SoS pushing hard for another war in another foreign country for dubious reasons. Then we could, if truly honorable and appropriate men and women, act from that self-knowledge. What that looks like is often pilloried by the 'crowd' as we humans love the simple answers or the absoluteness of saying something is all this or all that. We look at an 'evil' man and wonder how he loved his wife or dogs. We look at the 'good' man and wonder how he changed and 'sold his soul' for power, money, that hot young student, etc. And not to be sexist, we do the same with women as well. How can we be both? How can we decide after doing good to do bad or vice versus?

It is hard to stand alone and be that courageous. Few of us will ever be able to do that whether it is something as big as war with another country or as small as not lying to our daughter about the work we do.

Bu most of us will never gain that level of self-awareness or self-control. We will lie to ourselves again and again and again. We will rationalize our inconsistencies and incongruencies. But, we will say to ourselves and others, it is different this time. But, we will say, it is not the same thing. But, we will say, and on and on. We say, well in this area I must do that, but what of other arenas? We will claim to be 'thinking' when we should feel or claim to be 'feeling' when we should be thinking. We project, we deny, and we delude ourselves. We always have as humans and most of us always will.

Kerry is like anyone else. He is a typical human being with a typical human psyche. He is incongruent, others can see this, and dollars to donuts, he can not or will not himself. It does not make him 'evil'. It does not make him 'souless'. But he is also definitely not all 'good' either. The same holds true for Warren. We 'believe' she is all good. After all, look at her going after the bankers. But, it doesn't take blackmail to make a person make wrong choices or bad decisions. We are easily manipulated. We are easily swayed by dead children. We are easily convinced that it is somehow different this time for us or for them or for me.

Nothing really ever changes, and that is why history repeats itself. It doesn't look exactly the same every time. Of course not, that is silly. It is, however, thematically the same. The patterns repeat. Often is just seems like the backdrop changes. We have more 'technology' than 500 years ago, and yet we are still all acting individually and collectively the same.