A true and valid apology, is a judgment against one’s own behavior.
It is actually a sign of strength. It is becoming a more rare feat of integrity and honor to accept: First, responsibility for the outcome of one’s actions. Second, knowledge that ignorance, pettiness or malice caused injury to another. Third, compassion, empathy, and contrition for having caused physical or emotional harm to someone without justification.
The elements, especially the last one mentioned, “without justification” means that watering down the self-judgment with excuses, alibis, or faux justifications after the fact, renders any “apology” null and void on its face.
Taking Obama, for a prime example…showing signs of malignant narcissism, his instincts are to automatically blame other people for each and every result of his behavior, conduct, acts, words or deeds that requires an apology.
On the other hand, his “faux” apologies…are merely thinly-veiled conceits or worse, “apologies” that are not SELF-judgments, but rather, judgments of OTHERS for whom he has no capacity, no permission, no stature to judge, nor replace their moral values with the very tainted ones he owns.
It is quite common to see in the same person, the blame-shifting instinct for EVERY negative outcome, also mirror this behavior by taking EVERY credit, where none was earned or where their achievements or role in the positive outcome are exaggerated …at times almost to the state of pure fantasy.
Lastly, …one can see in arguments made by Obama an underlying extremism. This is true for radical extremists of every type. When extremism becomes a pathology in and unto itself. Every opinion not marching in lockstep is an “enemy”, every resistance a war, every voice of reason…a target of derision.
For radical extremists, apology is impossible. Self-judgment is tied to the raging, frothing, foaming need to destroy anyone who dares to disagree. The ability to reason and the ability to recognize moral, ethical or value boundaries being crossed is obliterated by near pathological intensity.
Radical leftism, thereupon…becomes a disease of the mind and a destroyer of the soul. One’s inability to see, hear, feel, the erosion of reason, and loss of a moral/ethical/value governor on one’s behavior…makes self-judgment automatically default to “I’m right, I’m always right…everyone I know agrees with me”. That’s when you look around and fail to realize….you are in a cult.
