Fundamental lack of a human skill

Dick Cheney’s comment that the Iraq war has been hardest on Prez Bush, and Bush’s lack of empathy for the people whose deaths he caused, get to the heart of the sociopathic nature of fundamentalists and fundamentalism.

They insist that their fundamental belief is the only correct belief, because they lack the ability to put themselves in other people’s moccasins. They cannot follow a metaphor, the way lizards don’t switch attention from a hand to what the hand’s pointing at. Even chimps, bonobos and dogs can follow a pointing finger.

Fundamentalists lack the ability to imagine feeling as another person might; when as children they played “make believe,” they probably pretended to be Daddy, not a Native American or an astronaut or a homeless person. They thought of themselves as being exactly like the people who reared them, and nothing else.

Why are the worlds of music, fine art and performing art filled by a majority of politically liberal or leftist people? Empathy for the "other."

W. considers war “exciting” because he can’t imagine any alternative, buying into Hollywood propaganda begun in WWII, where the movies make a lie of war. And he thinks that his prayers can cure the grief of military families.

W. and the Dick: one-dimensional mental midgets.

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