Gerald and Tara on the phone

                “So you’re equating integrity with ideology now.  You’re literally saying that if anyone disagrees with you on anything, they lack integrity.  Like, they’re lying about everything they say…in which case, your premise is absurd, because if they’re lying about what they say, then they actually agree with you, which implies that you lack integrity too.  Mm-hmm.”

                “I’m not equating integrity with ideology.  I’m not saying you lack integrity for disagreeing with me.  I’m just saying that you cannot continue to hold all the little positions that your ideology requires you to.  Look, Gerald, you’re going to have to one day decide whether you want to be an ideologue or right.  You can’t be both.  Too many tenets of your ideology are inconsistent with each other.  If you want to get on the side of the truth, you’re going to have to abandon some of those, because they by definition cannot all be right.  I’m trying to help you figure out which are which now, while you’re still fairly young, before you get set into any emotional pattern of thinking that would inhibit you from looking at this stuff objectively later on in life.”

                “I see.  So what you’re saying is, even if my ideology is 100% correct, I still lack integrity.  Thanks for pointing that out.  I’ve always—“

                “Shut up.”

                “I wish conservatives would start looking at integrity the way liberals look at drug addiction.  If we can’t blame someone for being an addict, then we can’t blame someone for lacking integrity.  Both conditions are probably entirely beyond the person’s control.”

                She hadn’t heard the grin in his voice; she seethed briefly, before realizing it wasn’t visible over the phone.  “That’s fucking ridiculous.  That’s the worst example of moral relativism I’ve ever heard.  Are you saying being dishonest is a what, a mental condition?  A deficit?  Like retardation?”  She wanted to yell that nobody was born addicted, but then she thought of crack babies and swallowed that thought.

                “I’m saying, that in my case, yes, that is exactly correct.  I am a retarded liar.  I am also one hundred percent correct about everything.  Those two statements support each other perfectly.  It’s an amazingly apt expression of the American political scene.”

                “Shut UP.”  This was the part of the conversation she always dreaded.  When he ran out of rhetoric, he resorted to that childish wit.  He rarely tried hard to win arguments, but he always tried to win conversations.  “I can freely stipulate that there are some people who are sociopathic, and who lack a conscience, and so might be predisposed to acting entirely without ethics whatsoever.  But they’re not involved.  They’re not members of society.  They almost never do anything that’s not in their direct personal interest, and I’m willing to bet that most sociopaths don’t vote.  What I’m talking about are people who vote, who take positions, who try to influence society’s development, and they do it all the while lying to themselves about the things they’re very passionately trying to change.  It’s no way to change a society.  Without an honest appraisal of the likely interactions between inconsistent principles being put into action over time, there can be no honest appraisal of unintended consequences.”

            “So what you’re saying now, is…I’m a sociopath.”

“Yes, Gerald.  That’s exactly what I’m saying.  But you’ve known this for years, yes?”

“Suspected.  I wonder if my subconscious was fighting me on finding the proof.  Do you think it’s mostly a character thing, or was I predisposed to this genetically?”

“In your case?  Character, totally.  The lack thereof.”

“Could still be my parents’ fault.  They must have raised me wrong.”

“They got the other two right.”

“Parents are always the least experienced with the first one.  That’s the one who statistically speaking gets the most therapy later in life.”

                Tara was suddenly bored with this.  There was just about nothing left to say, and she had, she realized with some irritation, unconsciously been expecting Gerald to say “gets the most brains at birth.”  She wanted to hang up before he thought of it too and started trying to find a way to work it into the conversation.  But he plowed on:  “Still, you gotta look at what’s heritable.  Something like half a person’s personality is directly inherited from the parents.”

                “And since that heritability includes a substantial fraction of one’s intelligence, one has to wonder why you were such an outlier in that regard.”  She instantly regretted saying this.  It had been intended as a lightweight jab, implying he was the laggart of the group, but of course she hadn’t specified which end of the scale he’d fallen off of. 

                It immediately backfired.  “Oh, ferfucksake,” he replied.  “I have never, not once, ever made an issue of that.  Only you have.”

                “I’m not,” she said defensively.  “I didn’t.  I…don’t.  I didn’t say what I meant to say.  Doesn’t matter.  Nobody’s jealous of anybody’s brain here.  We all three had two very smart parents, and we hit the jackpot.  It’s pretty much what you’d expect, statistically, right?”

                “I disagree.  American sitcoms have conclusively demonstrated that it is statistically impossible for all the siblings in any American family to be similarly intelligent.  At least one of them has to be ridonko-stupid.  I believe it’s called the Eighty / Twenty Rule.  Anyway, nobody ever said any one of us was smarter than the other two.”

                “No, you just acted like you were the smartest of us.”

                “How do you act smart?  Like, smarter than you really are?  Seriously, how is that even possible?  I didn’t have a scale I was comparing everybody to.  I just acted as smart as I thought I was justified in acting.  As I assumed everybody else was doing.”  

                 You were always free to try to keep up, he didn’t say.  She would probably have resented that one more than “born with the brains.”   She sought the moral high ground:  “Anyway, Lanie doesn’t think of herself as smart as we are.  I think your attitude really crushed her, like she could never really be smart like us, so she stopped trying back when we were little kids.”

                “So what you’re saying now, is my sociopathy has to be inherited, because there was no way I had enough time to develop it to so…sophisticated a degree by that age.  If we were still little kids.  Whew.  Not my fault.”

                “Did you not hear me just now?  You like crippled Lanie’s intellectual growth by not accepting her intelligence when she was a little girl.”

                “I did no such thing.  She was always the one I was directing all my jibes to, but they were about you.  We were making fun of you the whole time.  Just ask her.”

                “Gerald, she just told me a couple of days ago that she thinks of herself as the least intellectually well-endowed of us, and she thinks it’s like a gap of 30 IQ points between her and us.”

                “Aw, Tara, that’s just Lanie being stupid.”