Karma and dismissals

I feel like I'm experiencing a bit of karmic whiplash. I myself have been having to deal with someone with a personality on a daily basis, even being responsible for this person's welfare to a certain extent.  Let's call her Lola. I feel like I am getting more of an understanding of why people hate sociopaths so much. I kind of understand the source of the feeling behind comments like "Even if inherited..THEY KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG." Because the thing is that it is quite apparent that Lola knows right and wrong. To a certain extent she understands cause and effect -- drive under certain conditions and you will lose your license, fail to file a tax return and you will get audited. But she keeps doing these things. The next year she fails to file a tax return or the next month she is getting pulled over again and fighting to keep her license again.

Other family members have given up -- "if she wants help, she needs to learn to help herself." And the thing is all of these things are true, and she is low functioning. But the low functioning causes the behavior to be so bad, rather than the the behavior causing her to be low functioning. Even if it seems like she knows right and wrong and seems to be acting with free will and making wrong choices, it's more like when a pet dog is naughty and gets in the trash even though he knows he shouldn't rather than a normal personal with all of his faculties knowing right and just choosing wrong. But this is incredibly hard to understand, even for me. She says things like, "I don't want you telling people I have a disorder because then they will blame things on the disorder." Ok. But you do have a disorder. And they most likely will be quite correct in blaming things you say or do on the disorder. I don't really understand (because it is not in my personal experience) how can someone both be sort of ok in admitting that they have a disorder, but then in denial that the disorder is actually affecting their emotions and behavior and that they aren't 100% the captain of their destiny. But that dual belief is also part of the disorder.

In some ways I am one of the best positioned people to deal with her because I have my own experiences of knowing that I am expected to act or think or feel a certain way but never being able to close that gap between expectations and reality, not for lack of trying. And I have been thinking a lot about the idea of how it is very difficult for us to believe something that we have not experienced ourselves, particularly if it seems so far outside of our experience. Some people will admit that there are things that exist even though they don't understand how they could. Others are more prone to tidy dismissals. I thought of this in reading this quote from Jeanette Winterson:

The fashion for dismissing a thing out of ignorance is vicious. In fact, it is not essential to like a thing in order to recognize its worth, but to reach that point of self-awareness and sophistication takes years of perseverance.
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An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice, opinion, anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our feelings but right to test them too. If they are what we say they are, they will stand the test, if not, we will at least be less insincere.

She's talking about understanding art, but I think her thoughts have interesting parallels to dismissing anything out of ignorance:

When you say “This work has nothing to do with me.” When you say “This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/élitist etc.,” you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the “I” that we are.

A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?

[...]

The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art.