There are cannibals at the door.

I am trapped in my home, fearful of every time I leave that I may get sick. And there they are banging at the door.

Not just the front door, but all of the doorways of my life. My newspaper. My social media. My television. The cannibals are out there shrieking and screaming for my head.

I live far away from the United States and yet what happens there impacts me. The cannibals at the door do not care about international boundary lines. Their words and acts infect all of us.

So I fall back on my trusted ways of dealing with emotional and social chaos. I try to escape out of the confines of my head and look around from a bird’s eye perspective and be aware of what is happening to me and my mind. I try to think about the stories in my head that can make sense of it all. I recall an article I read long ago in the New Yorker Magazine about a desperately sad neurological disorder (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/an-error-in-the-code).

Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. A thankfully rare genetic disorder that perhaps impacts 1 in 380,000 births. A genetic defect in one gene causes a build up of uric acid in the body, which leads to major stomach and kidney problems. There is often poor muscle control and moderate intellectual disability. And then there is the damage to the developing brain. Starting in the second year of life there begins lifelong neurological symptoms including facial grimacing, involuntary moving of the limbs, and, worst of all, tendency to self-mutilate. Individuals with Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome start to bite their lips and tongues. Then they graduate to biting fingers and head-bashing.

There is a compulsion for self-destruction. Not only do these individuals cause themselves great harm, they also reject kindness. A gift is repaid with rage. They seek anger rather than love. They swear, spit and vomit, appearing to drive all other people away. They test patience to the fullest limits. The self-hate is evident, and they seem to have no ability for self-control. They literally cannibalize themselves and figuratively cannibalize their relationships.

I feel great pain at re-reading this article. Self-control is at the core of what it means to be human. It is called response-inhibition in psychology. One of the most well-known examples of response inhibition is the Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel and colleagues at Columbia University. A child is given the option of eating one marshmallow straight away or promised two marshmallows if he or she can wait 10 minutes. Children who were able to wait ended up scoring better on standardized tests and were thinner. Self-control was understood to be at the core of successful life outcomes. However, it turns out that one key variable was less self-control and more the life circumstance in which you were born. Poorer children tended to do less well at waiting than wealthier ones. But even with this, the point is clear, controlling impulses seems to be related to a better life.

I am aware of my own impulses for self-destructive behavior. There have been times in my life where the desire for death has nearly overcome my ability for emotional self-control. There have been moments in which I have felt the genetic power of my father, his brother and then their father’s capacity for rage and anger. I have often felt that much of my life has been a search for response inhibition: to not instinctively or aggressive react to troubling stimuli around me. To hold myself until the wave of emotion rolls over me and dissipates in order to move forward.

I do not think that I am very different to many people. Each person at some point needs to constrain intense emotions that threaten to be self-destructive. This is at the heart of what it means to have self-control. And yet, it feels so fragile. It is walking the thin rope above Niagara Falls trying not fall into the crushing sound and fury of the roiling waters.

But it would be a mistake to think that this is just about our own individual ability for impulse control. There is the mentality of the mob around us. Personal self-control is deeply influenced by societal self-control, which is central to being civilized. The whole premise of a civilization is based on the ideals of response inhibition: that we contain our own reflexive desire, greed and rage for the good of others. The core of the social contract is that self-control is about fairness and obligation to others. That can only happen when there is individual impulse control.

And this is what is so deeply frightening, as I try to hide from the cannibals at the front door. Any society has the capacity for its own destruction. We have seen that too many times in history. Now I feel it in the dystopian vision of America and its current politics. Civilized discourse requires response inhibition. We need to control our reactions to create space to listen. The cannibals at the door are too filled with rage. Their anger has become compulsive so that they bite and chew through the traditions of appropriate behavior in politics and society. Impulse control paves the way for ideas and empathy. Rage and violence subvert society into identity tribes in which an individual can let go of impulse control to spew toxic emotions against those who are “not like me.”

The cannibals are at the door. Clamoring for me to become part of the rage. To let go of the centuries of civilization that has told me to wait, think, listen and respond appropriately. A “me first” approach to life that means climbing clambering on the bodies of ideas of a civilized society. Only one can be first at the cost of everyone else. Barbarianism requires letting go of all self-control, and like the sufferers of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome means rejecting kindness, repaying love with anger and vitriol. These desperately sad individuals are a heart-aching example of the thin line between self-control and impulsivity. The cannibals are the door are a lesson on the thin veneer of what it means to be civilized.

In the next essay, I will write about where impulse control comes from and what it looks like.