On Oprah, you can jump up and down on the visitor's couch because you're in love. It's cool (sort of). But at airport security, if you are running around drunk, resisting arrest, and claiming you're just a depressed mother, the cops are going to assume you are a psycho. Because only a psycho would act like a psycho at airport security. The security of hundreds of more or less sane people at the airport trumps the welfare of someone impersonating a psycho.
I am sorry this woman died. But, what were her family members thinking when they allowed her, an alcoholic mother on her way to rehab, to travel by plane unescorted, where alcoholic drinks may be purchased? Did her husband really think airport personnel would believe someone phoning in an explanation for his wife's behavior? Did anyone in this family believe Richard Nixon when he declaimed, "I am not a thief!"? Does anyone ever take responsibility for their own actions? Is there anyone left on this planet who understands what it means to take responsibility for their own actions? Don't bother answering these rhetorical questions. I know the answers.
I am sorry this woman died. But, what were her family members thinking when they allowed her, an alcoholic mother on her way to rehab, to travel by plane unescorted, where alcoholic drinks may be purchased? Did her husband really think airport personnel would believe someone phoning in an explanation for his wife's behavior? Did anyone in this family believe Richard Nixon when he declaimed, "I am not a thief!"? Does anyone ever take responsibility for their own actions? Is there anyone left on this planet who understands what it means to take responsibility for their own actions? Don't bother answering these rhetorical questions. I know the answers.
This I think can be included as a part of the phenomenon, widespread in our society, that I call anti-prefrontalcorticism. This phenomenon presents itself in the antagonism of many toward those who exhibit behavior that is part of the aspect of human cognition known as executive control. Processes of executive control, including decision-making and reasoning, are supervisory and regulatory; i.e., they modulate the activity of other cognitive processes in a flexible and goal-directed manner. Executive processes may operate rapidly and largely unconsciously to guide the flow of sensory information or to initiate a motor action, as when reacting to unexpected events or obstacles in the environment. Or, they may involve measured and thought-driven processing, as when mentally simulating the consequences of a complex series of possible future actions. Executive processes are greatly dependent upon the mature development and neuronal connectivity of the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is phylogenetically and ontogenetically more recent, because its neuroanatomical substrate is seen later in the developmental trajectories of the human species and of individual organisms.
ReplyDeleteSo, who are the anti-prefrontalcorticists? They are the people who insist anger and excuses trump reason and accountability. They abhor the mental faculties that have served the human species so expediently in its quest to understand life and the universe more fully. Judgment, discrimination, and purpose are to be suppressed, according to their philosophy. Instead, actions should be based on impulse and lack of information. Their priorities include unexamined gratification of their own desires and unequivocal stroking of their own egos. Health and well-being are usually not priorities. But of course, when their unhealthy lifestyles lead to injury or disease, and their impulse purchases have not included health insurance for themselves or their family, they will be the first to cry, "Unfair!"
The anti-prefrontalcorticists' poster boy is Phineas Gage, who after traumatic injury to his frontal lobe is described by his doctor as follows.
" Gage was fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was 'no longer Gage.'"
It can be argued that even those anti-prefrontalcorticists who have not suffered traumatic brain injury might not be able to control their behavior due to some kind of congenital defect, whereby the rest of us should have pity on them. Though the jury is still out on the question of free will and the degree to which people can overcome personality deficits, I must say I have sympathy for the argument to pity the poor anti-prefrontalcorticists. Instead, maybe we should hold responsible their enablers, the pretenders who, in order not to offend the anti-prefrontalcorticists, proclaim like the witches in Macbeth, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair."