[For a moment he still looks frustrated, raw honest emotion. For a moment his face scrunches up in bitterness, eyes gone cold and hard, and then it all goes away, under a blank quiet like deep new snow.
If he doesn't trust Malcolm enough to keep arguing in good faith, then he has no right to keep arguing at all. If he's going to stop - just because Malcolm is wrong and dangerous is no excuse to hurt him on purpose, not when it will only feed Malcolm's defensiveness without driving him off, when it won't make anything better.]
I don't want you to give up. I want you to explain where my reasoning is wrong - if it is - or... what you mean by normal, if I'm wrong about how you're using it. I gave you definitions of how I mean what I said and the context of how I meant it and who I applied it to. You could explain to me why, factually, it's wrong. Or, maybe more helpfully, why what I said - a clinical analysis, not a judgement - upsets you so much. I was just trying to tell Shaw that I think she's more suited to the job, psychologically, than her predecessor and you came at me on the attack. Why?
You were intending to speak about Shaw and Hilbert, but what you said was an extremely reductive blanket statement about the nature of people, emotions, and evil, which you have confirmed multiple times you do actually believe. And I think if you go around saying that belief in public, the odds are high that you will hurt people. That's why I tried to argue with you.
Now that we have, I don't think we misunderstand each other. I think we have fundamentally different beliefs about the facts of the matter, and I don't think you're capable of hearing any of my explanations. That's why I want to stop.
But okay. I'll try one more time.
I did use normal as the opposite of disordered. What I did not do is use normal as a synonym for...positive, or optimal, or happy or even healthy. But it is normal, it is the correct functioning of the system, to be affected by circumstances. It's not paranoia if you can hear the hounds behind you. If you've been betrayed, it's normal not to trust. If you've been tortured, it's normal to dissociate. If you exist in the world, it's normal to develop some degree of self-protective callousness. If you are a child, it's normal to trust and absorb the values of the people who keep you safe. It's normal to learn from other people, because we're social creatures. Any and all of those things can lead to atrocities.
When you say people who've been through any of that "don't have normal emotions", or are sometimes just bad people or have something wrong with them, you're taking system of nested feedback loops and treating it like simple cause and effect, in what is mostly the wrong direction. Most people don't do atrocities because they have a disorder. People become disordered because their world makes it normal to commit atrocities.
It's possible to be disordered if, if the input-output process is throwing out coping mechanisms that are completely mismatched to the input. Someone who can't feel remorse, I'd call that disordered. That's abnormal. But it's very, very normal for remorse to be applied very sparingly, if the mind has learned that that's the best strategy to avoid pain. Hilbert very explicitly graduated because he did experience remorse after Blanky's death. He wasn't incapable. Only selective. And that's more than enough to enable him to do all the fucking atrocities he did. That's more than enough for millions of people, all the time.
Nobody is born broken. Someone breaks us. But being broken isn't... it's not the person's fault but it is a state of ill mental health. That's all I'm saying.
And...okay, I tried to make a broken bone metaphor but I can't make it work. Ill heath, then. Having a fever because your body is responding to infection is very different from having a thyroid condition that makes your body regulate its temperature incorrectly. Treating the former like the latter, calling it all disordered isn't helpful.
[Responding normally to infection. Symptoms and causes. Causes and effects.
Jedao sighs and shakes his head.]
No. You were only speaking to wardens, and I'm sure Hilbert in particular doesn't care. Drawing more attention to it will do more harm than good.
What I want is for you to be more careful about making sweeping generalizations and assumptions - especially about people you don't like, because it makes you extra careless - when you're speaking on an open channel. I don't know if that's...if there's a point to asking that.
[It seems baffling that Malcolm might have gone this long without anyone telling him so before now. Jedao can't know how much he's tried. Neither possibility is wildly encouraging, really.]
You might also be unwilling. You might have told me it's an unfair demand.
That's three possibilities and if you don't know which describes me, you'll also never find out if you don't ask. But maybe you don't care to know. Maybe this is a bridge too far and you don't think it's worth it anymore and that's why there's no point. You signed up to help inmates, not socially inept wardens who can't shut up.
You informed me what you want and “I don’t know if there’s a point” isn’t a question, either. And I wanted to know why you wondered that because I thought we were friends. Last time you told me I did a problem, I fixed it and didn’t do it again. That wasn’t an answer?
[Jedao bites his own tongue, hard, tastes bitter, metallic, oily ichor. Exactly the kind of petty bullshit he didn't want to argue about, that gave him reservations about bothering to ask at all. And Malcolm so wide-eyed and wounded like it was so unfair of Jedao to even consider, lasting all of twenty seconds. Jedao wants to bite someone. Someone else. He swallows his own not-blood in a quick, convulsive gulp.]
So I've informed you. Is that too high-handed for you to bother? I want you to be more careful because you think that's worth doing, not because I asked you to. Do it or don't, Malcolm.
[He takes a deep, weary breath.]
I'm angry and tired and I need to not be having this conversation anymore.
[He can feel himself holding back from being deeply, irrevocably cruel by a thread. He doesn't want to do it, except for the venom-bitter parts of him that absolutely do want to.]
[There isn't a kind answer to that question. But Malcolm asked.]
Every time you've been a careless, thoughtless asshole for the last two years, obviously. It's more than a pattern. It's the history of your whole time here.
You're an adult and a warden and you are desperately invested in being good at brains even though you know you're terrible at understanding people, which suggests that if you were both capable of and willing to paying attention, you ought to have figured it out by now without me pointing things out.
But better trying than not trying. I should have kept my pessimist trap shut. I'm sorry for hurting you and I'm sorry for failing you.
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If he doesn't trust Malcolm enough to keep arguing in good faith, then he has no right to keep arguing at all. If he's going to stop - just because Malcolm is wrong and dangerous is no excuse to hurt him on purpose, not when it will only feed Malcolm's defensiveness without driving him off, when it won't make anything better.]
Okay. You win. I'm giving up now.
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You were intending to speak about Shaw and Hilbert, but what you said was an extremely reductive blanket statement about the nature of people, emotions, and evil, which you have confirmed multiple times you do actually believe. And I think if you go around saying that belief in public, the odds are high that you will hurt people. That's why I tried to argue with you.
Now that we have, I don't think we misunderstand each other. I think we have fundamentally different beliefs about the facts of the matter, and I don't think you're capable of hearing any of my explanations. That's why I want to stop.
But okay. I'll try one more time.
I did use normal as the opposite of disordered. What I did not do is use normal as a synonym for...positive, or optimal, or happy or even healthy. But it is normal, it is the correct functioning of the system, to be affected by circumstances. It's not paranoia if you can hear the hounds behind you. If you've been betrayed, it's normal not to trust. If you've been tortured, it's normal to dissociate. If you exist in the world, it's normal to develop some degree of self-protective callousness. If you are a child, it's normal to trust and absorb the values of the people who keep you safe. It's normal to learn from other people, because we're social creatures. Any and all of those things can lead to atrocities.
When you say people who've been through any of that "don't have normal emotions", or are sometimes just bad people or have something wrong with them, you're taking system of nested feedback loops and treating it like simple cause and effect, in what is mostly the wrong direction. Most people don't do atrocities because they have a disorder. People become disordered because their world makes it normal to commit atrocities.
It's possible to be disordered if, if the input-output process is throwing out coping mechanisms that are completely mismatched to the input. Someone who can't feel remorse, I'd call that disordered. That's abnormal. But it's very, very normal for remorse to be applied very sparingly, if the mind has learned that that's the best strategy to avoid pain. Hilbert very explicitly graduated because he did experience remorse after Blanky's death. He wasn't incapable. Only selective. And that's more than enough to enable him to do all the fucking atrocities he did. That's more than enough for millions of people, all the time.
And some of them are here.
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Do you think I should issue a public apology?
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[And you should know better, he doesn't say.]
And...okay, I tried to make a broken bone metaphor but I can't make it work. Ill heath, then. Having a fever because your body is responding to infection is very different from having a thyroid condition that makes your body regulate its temperature incorrectly. Treating the former like the latter, calling it all disordered isn't helpful.
[Responding normally to infection. Symptoms and causes. Causes and effects.
Jedao sighs and shakes his head.]
No. You were only speaking to wardens, and I'm sure Hilbert in particular doesn't care. Drawing more attention to it will do more harm than good.
What I want is for you to be more careful about making sweeping generalizations and assumptions - especially about people you don't like, because it makes you extra careless - when you're speaking on an open channel. I don't know if that's...if there's a point to asking that.
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[It seems baffling that Malcolm might have gone this long without anyone telling him so before now. Jedao can't know how much he's tried. Neither possibility is wildly encouraging, really.]
You might also be unwilling. You might have told me it's an unfair demand.
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There is some overlap between the two, but only if I'm actually effective.
I did ask, you'll notice.
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So I've informed you. Is that too high-handed for you to bother? I want you to be more careful because you think that's worth doing, not because I asked you to. Do it or don't, Malcolm.
[He takes a deep, weary breath.]
I'm angry and tired and I need to not be having this conversation anymore.
[He can feel himself holding back from being deeply, irrevocably cruel by a thread. He doesn't want to do it, except for the venom-bitter parts of him that absolutely do want to.]
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Every time you've been a careless, thoughtless asshole for the last two years, obviously. It's more than a pattern. It's the history of your whole time here.
You're an adult and a warden and you are desperately invested in being good at brains even though you know you're terrible at understanding people, which suggests that if you were both capable of and willing to paying attention, you ought to have figured it out by now without me pointing things out.
But better trying than not trying. I should have kept my pessimist trap shut. I'm sorry for hurting you and I'm sorry for failing you.
Now please fuck off.
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