RZ wrote:
Just ran across this today; http://www.guardian.co.uk/...ce-armstrong-cycling Does anyone know if that exchange (end of article) with Lemond and L.A.'s mother supposedly actually happened? Or did the author just make that up to try to prove some point? This is the first I have ever heard of this.
Armstrong was a child of single mother with a father that willfully disowned him. That subconscious damage runs very deep. Really deep. Mothers are good at caring for children, but without a father to cushion the fundamental sociopathy of general human society (oh, you thought we had a moral, upstanding world out there?), the child learns pretty quickly to distrust everyone.
Inevitably there's a stepfather. That stepfather doesn't care about the child, only cares about the woman and the child is baggage. So the child learns to distrust the motives of even those closest to them. The child trusts nobody. Any shelter and support is conditional, and can be removed at any time.
From these fires can come champions, psychological torture that steels the mind for uncompromising competition. Nobody cares about the child, so he doesn't care about them. Outwork them, outsmart them, and outcheat them, because they will do the very same thing. If there are rules, and they aren't being applied to the enemy, then why should the child follow them? They are just another way of disadvantaging the child, who is already disadvantaged. And the child has had enough of that.
The child learns to form its own code. The laws, customs, culture of the world didn't protect the child growing up. Labels that should have protected the child, like "mother", "father", "guardian", "friend", have been proven to be lies a dozen times over. So what is a true friend? What is true protection? What is loyalty? What is love? What is success?
The child defines its own meanings, rules, signs for those. Usually they are more idealized that what most people practically regard them, since the child did not live them, only knows them in theory, in ideal, without the warts of living them in real life.
This child seems to value trust above all things, and if the trust is violated, a trust given very very carefully, it provokes the vindictiveness that only a childhood of pain and betrayal can provoke. The child sees an enemy worse that any peripheral enemy like "journalist" or anything else. The child sees their father: someone that should have protected him, but instead betrayed him in the worst way.
The child seems vindictive, sensitive to slights, devalues relationships, trusts nobody. The child is competitive, driven, and a very hard worker. The child is desperate and hungry.
The child becomes rich and famous.
The child sees that fame brings an entirely different breed of distrust. Motives of people around him become even more contemptously shallow. They want his money. They want his fame. They want to make money tearing down his fame.
The child sees a system that used to protect the dopers (if they were European dopers) but doesn't now that the doper is him. The child sees a sport that was organized around team doping and doping culture for decades, the sport that he followed the unwritten rules on, be turned against him, now that he is the success. The child only sees a world that is out to get him, when others were not punished. The child sees an unfair world.
...
Okay, does that excuse his actions or free him from complicity of his sins? Nope.
But I believe that is the psychology of Lance Armstrong. I don't know if that makes him a psychopath (I believe psychopaths are fundamentally born without empathy, not conditioned to reject it as Armstrong's upbringing suggests).
I believe the world is ugly, mean, capitalist, and unfair. The culture values winners at all costs.
Our values produced this man and his career. To lay the blame on him as a "bad apple" rejects the very nature of the society we have constructed and the gladitorial bloodsports we blindly cheer.