Jew World Order

John Edwards is the putrefied meat of the American political system — literally, as far as your brain is concerned. Think about Edwards for a moment — the perfect hair, the honey voice, the oleaginous smile. Your lip curled ever so slightly, didn’t it? A teensy bit of bile may have risen in your throat. The lip curl is a threat display, the bile is an attempt to purge a toxin. Both were triggered at least partly by your prefrontal cortex and your temporal lobes — and both would have also occurred if you’d smelled a piece of food gone bad.

Edwards, the one-time North Carolina senator and serial presidential candidate, was back in the news last week, as he motioned for another postponement of his campaign finance trial, set to begin Jan. 30 on charges that he illegally used campaign donations to cover up his affair with a staffer — with whom he later had a child. While his wife was dying of cancer.
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Nasty stuff, to be sure, more than enough to exclude a man permanently not just from the political arena, but even from polite company. And yet there’s a certain deliciousness to the way we loathe Edwards. We dismiss a mass killer like Osama bin Laden with a simple “rot in hell.” We dismiss O.J. Simpson with a simple “rot in jail.” And before you say that the difference is that both of those thugs have at least been dealt with, consider that the thrice-married and repeatedly unfaithful Newt Gingrich behaved nearly as despicably as Edwards, yet even now he is making a credible, if fading, run for the White House. Edwards, by contrast, can’t walk into a restaurant without the risk of getting pelted by dinner rolls.

There are a lot of things that make the ex-senator the pariah he is, and the brain is indeed one of biggest players. It was only in the last decade or so, with the widespread use of functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), that neurologists discovered the overlapping circuitry that governs morality and disgust. In one study conducted in many parts of the world, pairs of subjects are given a quantity of cash to share — say $100 — with one of them getting to decide how the sum will be split and the other having the right to accept or reject the offer. If the deal is accepted, they both get the cash; if it’s rejected, they both get nothing.

On average, subjects turn down any proposed division that offers them less than 43% of the pot — meaning they walk away from a free $43 simply because the other guy is getting $57. And when the subjects who reject the deal are scanned by fMRIs, their brains show pronounced activity in the disgust regions.

“There is literal disgust and moral disgust, and the two overlap,” says Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “Betrayal, hypocrisy, certain kinds of baseness trigger the brain’s moral response.”
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Our umbrage isn’t reserved for situations in which our ox is the one that’s getting gored. One 2006 study conducted in the U.K. found similar activity in the brain’s disgust lobes when people simply observe someone else getting cheated. What’s more, the more honorably the victim had behaved, the more powerfully the observers’ brains would respond. By contrast, victims who had themselves cheated someone else earlier in the study would elicit a much weaker neurological response. Edwards, a bad guy who cheated a sickly and suffering woman, practically makes our brain lobes explode.

The hypothetical consequences of Edwards’ shabby behavior only make things worse. He wasn’t willing simply to burn down his marriage and his career; he was also willing to take the country — or at least the blue-state half of it — with him. “Edwards’ affair surely would have come out if he’d won the nomination, and he’d surely have lost the election as a result,” Haidt says. “The country went through this already with Bill Clinton and it arguably cost Al Gore the 2000 election.” That’s not something Democrats in particular are inclined to forgive — even though they ultimately won the 2008 election — and may explain why they seem to loathe the man who was, after all, their party’s 2004 vice presidential nominee far more than Republican do.

For all these things, the biggest factor in the utter destruction of the Edwards brand might be the way the inner man clashed so dramatically with the veneer he presented to the world — and that’s not the case with most political scoundrels. Was it any surprise that Bill Clinton eventually came to grief over a White House affair? Is it any surprise when Gingrich, who just ain’t a very nice guy, acts that way?

“It’s a question of what these people are selling,” says psychologist Michael Schulman, author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. “Clinton was selling a kind of goodness, but also a sexuality with it. There was a sense he couldn’t help himself. Gingrich, you expect to be a club fighter. Edwards sold goodness in a sort of beatific way, so when we find out he’s so soiled and corrupt there’s nothing left but loathing.”
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The camera-ready looks that made Edwards so appealing to juries and, at one time, voters, may have made that unmasking all the worse. Haidt points to a widely cited 1975 study in which subjects were asked to impose sentences on imaginary defendants, based only on a description of the imaginary crime and a photo of a person who was said to be the perp. As a rule, the subjects conformed to the general human bias of favoring attractive people over less-attractive ones — and tended to impose more lenient sentences on them as a result. The only exception was when the crime was fraud and was said to have been abetted by the crooks’ good looks. Then the study subjects threw the book at them.

“When the people in the scenarios used their attractiveness in their crimes it switched the valence,” says Haidt. “They actually got a heavier sentence.” Edwards, narcissistic pretty-boy, surely won a lot of early supporters just that way and is just as surely paying the price now.

No matter how Edwards emerges from his own, very real criminal trial, he may not be destined to spend his entire life banished to the fringes of the national village. Paradoxically, the more his critics — to say nothing of his prosecutors — are seen to be piling on, the more our temporal lobes and prefrontal cortices may switch the valence once more, turning even a deeply loathed perpetrator into an unlikely victim. It would be a slow and circuitous road to redemption and it’s by no means guaranteed. But for a man who’s justly fallen a far as Edwards has, it may be the only one.

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