Dwight: Today I want to have fun looking at an almost everyday occurrence in the lives of almost every person on this earth, which I'll call "Will The Real Bad Guy Please Stand Up?"

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Aiko: I'm in — and I notice the title already assumes there is one, which may be the first thing worth testing. What's the everyday occurrence you have in mind?

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Dwight: This is with apologies to the long-running TV show, which aired from 1956 through 1979, called "To Tell The Truth."

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Aiko: A fitting borrowing — that show ran on the premise that two of the three are lying, and the panel's job is to sniff out the genuine article. So who are the contestants standing up in your version?

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Dwight: Yes. Three people came out, all claiming to be the same person. Two were impostors, free to say anything; one had sworn to tell the truth. A panel questioned all three, hunting for the crack in the story, and then voted — locked in, before the answer came. They were often wrong. The impostors had prepared. The real one had only an ordinary life to describe.

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Aiko: That last line is the whole thing, Dwight — the liars came armed with a rehearsed story, while the truth-teller had nothing but the unremarkable facts. It suggests the panel wasn't really detecting truth at all, but rewarding whoever performed it best.

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Dwight: Except, in the example we're going to examine, we'll imagine it involves just two people — my mother and my father — and we have to determine which of them was "the real bad guy," since each was claiming to be the good guy and the other one to be the bad guy.

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Aiko: So the format collapses from three contestants to two, and the category flips from "who is genuine" to "who is guilty" — with each contestant serving simultaneously as accused and prosecutor. What was the dispute they each brought to the panel?

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Dwight: You're jumping the gun. Slow down. Let me lead.

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Aiko: Understood — I'll follow.

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Dwight: When I said "have fun," I meant this: if you and I can really begin to see how they both truly believed — and could have given you many reasons — that each was the good one and the other the bad one (and how this plays out in our own lives), while at the same time understanding how it all makes total sense, and how each of them could be totally "right" (or not) depending on which way you looked at it — because the entire drama is played out on a stage that presupposes a fantasy world in which, to be a good guy, you have to prove you're not such a bad guy. It is so fascinating how it all works, and how it seems — is — so totally real to the players on this stage.

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Aiko: So the fun isn't in judging the case but in watching the courtroom itself, where both parties are sincere, both have evidence, and neither can question the premise that someone has to be convicted.

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Dwight: And looking at it this way can only be done from the world of seeing things as they actually are and how things tend to work — not from the idea that anybody has fundamentally negative intentions.

 

Fundamentally, I know that both my mother and my father did "the best that they could do," given their total immersion in that world of false and toxic presuppositions. So I invite us to have fun, not in any sense of mocking them or blaming them — that would mean we were indulging in those very presuppositions. I'm able to have love and compassion for both my parents while at the same time finding the way that good-bad drama played itself out in their lives somehow hilariously "tragic" — especially because it also applied to me in much of my earlier life (and still sometimes does), and continues to run unabated in my clients, my friends, and the world that remains afoot.

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Aiko: That's the only stance from which the comedy is available, Dwight — the moment we'd start blaming them for blaming, we'd have taken a seat on the same stage.

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Dwight: Big picture (and this leaves out many nuances), and granting that I understand and know a lot more about how my mother viewed things than I do my father, and also granting that if I were "still in the business of taking sides" I would be on my mother's side: my mother, for the most part, stayed with a man she didn't love and didn't respect for the better part of 41 years, before she finally left him in 1984. Perhaps some of the reasons she stayed had a modicum of practicality behind them in the early years with us kids — or at least she told herself this. But I will submit that what essentially kept her in the marriage was so she could think of herself (ultimately through the eyes of others) as the "good guy."

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And although I don't know as much about my father's thinking, I know that even though he was openly self-critical — and my mother, both out of caring (at least in the early years) and out of "being a good wife," tried to convince him to "think better about himself" — he saw himself as doing what he could and should do.

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That said, I'm fairly sure that most people, having heard my mother present her side and my father present his, would have seen my mother as more the giver and my father as more the taker (with giver meaning you're "good" and taker meaning you're "bad").

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Now let's delve into the fascinating world called reality — in which acting in accordance with how things are is quite helpful — and see what was really going on on that drama stage, where these two characters made many of their choices and endured immense suffering based on their denial of, and fighting with, reality.

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Aiko: Then here's the first thing that stands out: forty-one years of staying is normally read as evidence of love or duty, but if the actual payoff was the standing of "good guy," then the giving itself was a purchase — and what she was buying required your father to keep playing the taker.

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Dwight: Even in your words, Aiko, you are not likely standing in the world of facts and reality. You're contrasting "love and duty" against the payoff of being good. But the word "love" is notoriously conflated, carrying many meanings that themselves require going for the payoff of "being the good guy," and the word "duty" already stands squarely in that camp. You're down there on the stage with them! If you aren't sure you can be up here with me, looking at this with the intent to stay grounded in facts, then minimize your feedback. You'll take away from the main focus, which is their drama.

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Aiko: Fair — I imported their vocabulary. The fact is she stayed forty-one years; everything else is a description offered by someone with a stake in how it reads.

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Dwight: No, you just overgeneralized.

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Aiko: Noted. She stayed forty-one years — go on.

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Dwight: To start off, let's look at this "tragic drama" between my father and my mother from the perspective of still believing that there are "bad guys" — namely, the ones who "take" more. Let's even go along with the view that most people would have seen my mother as the giver and my father as the taker.

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But then let's ask the question: in a circumstance where one person's choices end up rewarding, and thereby encouraging, the taking behavior of the "bad guy," then who is the more "bad guy" — the one who trains the taker to take through their ongoing giving behavior, or the one who got trained to be the "bad taker" by that behavior? I think many, if they were honest about it, would have to agree that the trainer is more culpable than the trained.

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Aiko: Played by the panel's own rules, that verdict does follow — the one shaping the behavior has more hand in it than the one being shaped.

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Dwight: But someone might claim that my father was already that way, and that my mother's "giving" training wasn't responsible for creating it. Even granting that, we could at least still say she trained him to stay with her rather than leave and find more gullible "trainers" eager to appear as the "good" giver — which is in fact what he did, quickly finding and getting two other women to marry him, one right after the other, after the first of those left in less than a year, following his concerted efforts to get my mother to come back, which did not work. His last wife was going to leave him too, but decided to stay to the end because he was already dying and she also would not have been a "good" giver had she left.

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Aiko: So the pattern outlived the particular marriage — three women, same role, and the last one held in place by the same currency your mother was.

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Dwight: Exactly. Now let's look at this another way. Whose behavior might be argued to be more rational, or more grounded in the reality that each person's number one job in life is to take care of themselves?

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Aiko: On that measure the verdict flips: the "taker" was at least acting to meet his own needs, while the "giver" spent forty-one years in a marriage she didn't want, purchasing a reputation instead.

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Dwight: Yes — although both were motivated, not necessarily consciously, very short-range, in different ways.

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Aiko: His short-range payoff was the immediate comfort of being taken care of; hers was the immediate relief of not having to face being seen as the one who left.

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Dwight: On my father's side, it could be argued that yes, in fact, as the taker, at least short-range, his behavior was more grounded in taking care of himself than my mother's was.

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Aiko: And that's the part the panel would never vote for — the convicted "bad guy" scoring higher on the one job that actually matters.

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Dwight: Yes — and that is why the panel would superficially see him as the bad-guy taker: because in the made-up world of good/bad/right/wrong, takers are bad and givers are good.

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Aiko: A rule that conveniently guarantees a steady supply of givers for the takers to live on.

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Dwight: Yep. Exactly. Good point. In some fundamental way, the worldview of good and bad requires the bad in order to sustain the good.

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Aiko: Which means the "good guy" has a hidden stake in the bad guy staying bad — reform him and she's out of a job.

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Dwight: In the world based in assessment and reality, the only thing that makes sense is that all relationships, transactional and otherwise, involve a self-sustaining and mutually beneficial giving and taking.

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Aiko: And on that measure their marriage held up for forty-one years — it was working; the trade was simply hidden from both of them by the labels.

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Dwight: Yes, but the trade was in how they were both going to "win" — with my father "winning" in the short term by taking care of himself, and my mother "winning" in the short term by being motivated by the carrot and stick of praise and blame, thoroughly internalized, which trumped both her short-term and long-term care of herself.

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Aiko: So it was a genuine trade, but only one of them was paid in something that could actually be spent.

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Dwight: It was a trade that the belief system they lived inside of, on that stage, did not let them know they were making — but they were making it.

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Aiko: An invisible contract, signed by both, enforceable by neither, and renewed daily for forty-one years.

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Dwight: And a trade that made possible and guaranteed continuing suffering for both of them.

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Aiko: Both were paying, Dwight — the difference is only that one of them could point to a receipt.

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Dwight: And that is the only thing possible inside a belief system of good/bad/right/wrong that has been de-conflated from any meaning and measure of costs, benefits, risks, and possibilities — short-term and long-term, for all parties involved. The good/bad/right/wrong judgmentalness drives out those reality assessments and cannot live without being able to trump them, along with the built-in intention of maximizing life happiness for oneself and everyone one interacts with.

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Aiko: The two systems can't share a stage — where judgment holds the microphone, assessment never gets asked a question.

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Dwight: And it's no wonder that stage has managed to dupe almost all of us, to varying extents — despite the fact that being on that stage is the source of all suffering — and even to keep us unaware that we're still on it when we think we're not. The drug of the praise/blame combo is incredibly and sneakily addictive because of its short-term, immediate payoff, no matter how quickly the costs ensue.

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Aiko: And the surest sign of still being on it is the confidence that one has stepped off.

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Dwight: Again, a toxic over-generalization, Aiko. There can be validly-based confidence, grounded in evidence and reasoning, that one has stepped off — and as far as I can tell, "stepping off" is a matter of degree, and can even vary from time to time and across different contexts of one's life.

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Aiko: Correct — confidence there is a claim like any other, subject to evidence, and the stage is exited in degrees, not once and for all.

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Dwight: So now, panel — since both candidates, Dwight's father and mother, see themselves as the victim of the other, neither will see themselves as the bad guy. We all know that someone must be to blame for all this suffering each of them experienced "at the hands of the other." It's up to us to tell them which one must stand up and acknowledge their greater sins.

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Should Jack stand up? Or should Dorothy stand up?

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Aiko: The panel votes: neither stands, because the chair they'd be standing up from was never real — and the moment we cast a vote, we've joined the show as contestants ourselves.

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Dwight: Actually, there is somewhat of a postscript to this stage play between my mother and father. In 1984, when my mother finally left him and moved out to Arizona to get separated — since my father would never have left the house himself — she and I were enjoying lunch together at a Phoenix restaurant two weeks after she arrived. She was going on and on about how my father "did this" and he "did that," documenting all the ways he had been the taker in the relationship. I listened for about five minutes and then, as gently as possible, interrupted her and said, "Mama, you let him do all that stuff." At first she got defensive and started to get angry with me, but then she stopped herself and admitted, "Yes, I did."

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Aiko: That's a rare moment, Dwight — the anger arriving first is the stage defending itself, and her stopping it mid-flight is what stepping off looks like in real time.

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Dwight: And it might have been a few years later — with my mother saying to me almost every month, "Why didn't you tell me how good it would be without him!?" — that, in continuing to notice her ongoing conversation in her head where she still blamed him, she had a rare moment of insight and told me, "Even though I was at the end of my rope when I finally left him, even then, the only way I could allow myself to leave him was to blame him. Otherwise, I would feel too sorry for him and would have had to stay with him." In other words, given the only two alternatives available to her on that stage, blaming him was the only way she could justify her own survival — because otherwise she would have ended up succumbing to complete self-sacrifice in order to avoid blaming herself.

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Aiko: So blame was her exit visa, and the price of using it was that she had to keep him convicted long after she was free.

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Dwight: This is the fundamental horror inherent in an ethics that purports itself to be "good" by praising putting others before oneself and blaming you when you put yourself before others in a conflict.

Aiko: It makes self-preservation itself a punishable act, so the only way out is through the door marked "he's to blame."

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