User:John Bessa/Understanding Bessa

Current Context: The global warming crisis has created moments of positivism with new energy ideas and environmentally-beneficial vegetable sources. But 'positive' in the context of the other big problem, COVID and its variants, is a bad thing. Perhaps 'positive' will ultimately retreat to its original, logical meaning: to push. 'Push', the extrusion of the synthesis of concrete that replaces all of our natural experiences purely for the benefit of the modernist accomplishment: carbon-emitting industrialized society.

Bessa responded to two significant events in pursuit of an answer:

• He suffered full-on post-traumatic stress disorder as an outcome the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. He wanted answers.
• He inherited a trauma from his (non-Jewish) family in France who were killed by Nazis. His great-grandfather absorbed bullets meant for his (then) young mother. He long sought a specific source for the proto-Nazism that festered Germany resulting in this event.

To achieve these goals, he stood on the 'shoulders of giants', which ultimately provided a red-herring. Within a year of the terror attack, research, both empirical, and philosophical and spiritual, made him assume that those who flew the planes into the buildings lacked the 'true love' or, technically, the empathy necessary for beneficial activity in healthy society. The empathy model was written after a study of empathy from a Darwinian perspective, and preceded his masters work in psychology. The psychological component was built from the testimony of client/patients who, on average, described as much as half a dozen different professional diagnoses.

With his master's work, he switched from patient testimonials to the philosophical and empirical outcomes expressed in documents such as the DSM. Still seeking a specific, actual answer (rather than mountains of psycho-rhetoric) and created a simplified model of three dysfunctional components that might add up to the answer:

• hallucinations
• inability to self-control
• inability to feel other's feelings

Combinations of these components should have, in his view, described components necessary to allow a human to carry out purely-malicious behaviors (such as affected him) with the appropriate socio-environmental triggering.

All this effort, especially in combination with teaching strategies, amounted to much really good stuff that has circulated (mostly) in education and somewhat in psychology.

The down side is that approximately 20 years of functional testing failed to consistently predict these behaviors based on these conditions. Eventually he exited his effort largely on the advice of outcomes of deep meditation and prayer in a highly-spiritual place. God said "not quite, here try this". 'This' was easily described in cinema, but (oddly) nowhere else. Important to Bessa was Fritz Lang who described Nazi Germany as a mental hospital with the most insane inmates in control in Doctor Mabuse. But a concise description is in A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. We see an obvious situation, but without empirical explanation. Instead we see 'lack of love' which Bessa ultimately had to discard. He wasn't totally off, and did the World a huge benefit in both education and psychology. And he wasn't really too far off the mark.

It's just that the data (way) off. The real answer is there. God describes it as an error he needs our help cleaning up. We all know about it as we see it in so much cinema -- but empiricists won't approach it. So Bessa self-deprecated.