Some social groups seem less likely to offer sound principles for living the good life than others. High on the list of unlikely subjects of inspiration for most people would be registered sex offenders. As a class, these are people who have violated the sanctum of other human beings, broached social norms and decency, and acted out deviant desires no civilized person should entertain.
And yet, those child predators willing to reflect on their experiences have insights into human frailty and growth which are well worth listening to. Mark Laita, an experienced commercial photographer turned human interest documentarian, has interviewed dozens of people convicted of sexual crimes as well people hurt at the hands of such criminals. Laita’s work, publicly available through his Soft White Underbelly YouTube channel, is not limited to people involved in sexual crimes but explores a wide range of social outcasts, what Laita terms the “underbelly” through which so many societal problems proliferate.
In almost every interview—whether with a pimp, a drug addict, an inbred Appalachian backwoodsman, a porn star, or a convict—Laita starts his interview at the beginning: childhood. He asks people if they had a mother and father when they were growing up. The answer for many is complicated. He asks how they would describe their childhoods. The answers range from “happy” and “normal” to “chaotic,” “lonely,” and “violent.” Often, interview subjects seem surprised at the questions, as if struggling to see how their childhood relates to their present life circumstances or chosen profession.
The accounts are not for the faint of heart. Halfway through someone’s gripping story, the viewer may realize with a sinking feeling how dripping with self-pity and unreliable the narrative has become. Stories of pain do not have an easy resolution; there is often no triumphant moment of catharsis for the living subject or the audience. Yet, there are quiet moments of hope throughout. There are interviews when people share hard-won insights about living life in a fallen world, how to overcome tremendous obstacles, and how to experience joy even amid seemingly unending pain.
The interviews with sex offenders are no exception. There is the shield of self-pity, the mind-forged manacles that cushion the offender from the harsh realities he or she does not want to face. For example, rare is the offender who admits there were any indiscretions beyond what was prosecuted under the law. While that may be true for some, the likelihood that this is widely applicable seems vanishingly small.
One would be wise also to question the motivations of criminals such as these willing to sit for an interview. Is there a desire to justify their grotesque actions, excuse their behavior that has violated the innocence of children, or give the illusion of redemption by speaking forth the socially acceptable responses while remaining hard-hearted and unrepentant? There is evidence of all these temptations when people state what they know to be the correct response to a question and subtly undermine it with vague backstory and open-ended questions.
But there is also quiet heroism that emerges in these disgraced men and, rarely, women. These are people who know themselves to be capable of evil. Not just the humdrum “evil” of throwing away a plastic spork but the soul-damaging destruction of violating a child, placing selfish and unnatural desires above the wellbeing of another living person. The individual who has sat with that realization and moved forward has something to teach us about living.
One such example comes in the interview with Bill. According to his telling, Bill’s childhood was one of terror, sexual abuse from his mother, beatings and bullying from his father. From this dysfunction, Bill grew to be a socially inept loner with vile fantasies on which he occasionally acted.
Bill, a self-proclaimed psychopath according to test results, argues that intensive therapy cured him of psychopathy and rehabilitated him to the point of having a cozy relationship with his granddaughters. It’s enough to make one’s blood run cold to realize that if psychopathy is indeed incurable, as many say, then the state’s hefty bill for intensive therapy went towards giving an incredibly sick person the vocabulary and presentation skills to appear healed. Even if it is an act, a devious disguise to allow for further violations, Bill’s principles are sound. Whether or not he lives out what he preaches, he points the way to a flourishing inner life and harmony with other people.
Personal responsibility
First, Bill appears to accept responsibility for his actions, stating,“I made my decisions…I’m not one of these to say, ‘Oh, my mommy took my pacifier away too early. No. I did what I did. I made the decisions. I created the problems. I committed the actions. I did that; that was me. Nobody did not, and it’s nobody else’s fault. It’s my fault.” This is a hard place to land. The logical solution to such depravity is annihilation, which is why many people still loudly call for the execution of such criminals. When the depravity is within oneself, the annihilation will be also. How, then, can you find the courage to keep living?
Bill continues, “But that’s a static thing [the actions]; you can’t undo that. All I can do is figure out why I did that, what contributed to that, what was the cocktail that all the conditions were right to make that happen, and make sure that those conditions don’t happen again.” This sentiment was echoed by other child predators and drug addicts. Once you reach the point of not wanting to be ruled by base behaviors, addressing the train of actions, personalities, drugs, and self-pity that go into enabling the destructive actions becomes necessary.
After years of working in prisons as a psychiatrist, the doctor known by the pseudonym Theodore Dalrymple writes about the habits and thinking that keep people locked in a prison of addiction. Rather than recognize the confluence of social and personal factors that lead us to do things we say we don’t want to do, the addict remains mired in delusion, willfully ignorant to the reality of his circumstances. In contrast to the perpetual addict, Bill observes, “All it takes is the introduction of some rational thought to understand how to handle it. It’s not really that difficult to handle once you’re willing to do it, once you’re willing to be honest about it.” Elsewhere he observes, “Put yourself in temptation’s way and you’re going to fold eventually.” This expression of the “near occasion of sin” that used to be commonly held moral teaching enlightens us to our weaknesses and gives us the tools to avoid the behavior we claim to abhor.
Letting go of perfectionism
One would not expect a child predator to be a victim of perfectionism, but, in Bill’s case, he suggests this was part of his downfall. He tells Laita, “You know what, you don’t have to be perfect. Everything doesn’t have to feel good. Sometimes there are just bad feelings, and that’s okay. You try to hold yourself up to such a standard of perfection that you can’t possibly meet, and as a result you end up trying to nurse your emotional wounds of falling short of who you’re supposed to be. And I found some pretty screwed up ways of doing that.”
Here, as we have seen elsewhere, trying to maintain standards of purity and perfection lead to a fatal dualism and Manichean outlook. Living in nuance,
Idealism, unlike perfectionism, does not reside in the individual but outside. We can ceaselessly strive toward the ideal without growing weary because it is for the striving and not to be attained. Perfectionism is an obsession with lack and a hounding sense that something must be achieved. Ideals are worth pursuing, but perfectionism is deadly.
Finding the limits of control
Bill, like so many perpetrators and victims of the traumas that appear in interviews on the Soft White Underbelly channel, appears to confront himself, the only person over whom he has control. It was, according to his telling, when he landed in the intensive therapy center for sexual predators that he came to terms with this fact. He said,“There’s nobody left to blame. I’m sitting here in a cell by myself.”
Stories show us how freedom becomes a prison when we are incapable of being in charge of ourselves. Self-government begins truly within the self. Whether or not we are convicted criminals sitting in a literal cell, we can awaken to find ourselves imprisoned by our wrong-headed ideas, chains of habit, and self-indulgent tendencies. Whether victim or perpetrator, and often an individual is both, freedom begins with focusing on where we really have control, a limited but meaningful sphere within the self.
2 comments
Comments are closed.