If you have not spent the past two weeks seeking personal enlightenment or sleeping under a log, you will have heard about the adventures of the Governor of South Carolina, who inexplicably left the Palmetto State to its own devices for five days to go canoodling with a woman he had met on a trade mission to Argentina. The state's law-enforcement agencies were put on full alert as the Governor's cabinet anxiously sought to establish his whereabouts - but he was half a world away, insulated from such mundane worries by the cushioning arms of a woman not his wife.
What the dickens, you may ask, is going on here? How can someone with the savvy and street-smarts necessary to finance and win a gubernatorial campaign possibly believe that he can simply go AWOL from the job of governing four and half million people? What mystical powers did this South American sireen have that she could make a man forget his daily responsibilities, not to mention his wife and four sons? Why does this story seem so far-fetched, yet - when you think about it - so probable?
There are three answers. The first, and simplest, was provided by the comedian Robin Williams: "God gave men a penis and a brain, but not enough blood to use both at the same time."
The second has to do with the strange evolutionary pressures on us humans, the primates whose children take the longest to reach maturity. Our mating habits are a convoluted attempt to reconcile two entirely different urges: to build a strong family unit to bring up children - and to spread our genes as widely as possible.
Everyone knows that men have a hair-trigger libido. Male primates of every species look, and lust, with shameful indiscretion. But women, too, have conflicting agendas: they can recognize immediately, even from photographs, the testosterone levels of men, and prefer as a long-term partner the man whose lower testosterone levels suggest that he will be more understanding and fond of children. Yet women prefer a high-testosterone man for the occasional fling, especially in mid-cycle when they are at their most fertile. A helping of dominant, risk-taking genes might be useful for the next generation.
Men also have a mental conflict between the opportunistic view of mating and the genuine desire to build a family and preserve its shared interests. The easiest resolution to that conflict is to split the ideas completely into the titles of "wife" and "mistress;" to the philanderer it's as if these two live on separate planets - or, in the Governor's case, separate continents. If the two parallel lives never overlap, it's possible to believe sincerely that you are living both of them with complete integrity.
Clues to the third answer emerged at the Governor's first meeting with his cabinet. He sounded formulaically contrite, admitting "I put you in a bad place." But he was quickly on the forehand again, berating them for their panic during his unexplained absence: "every one of you all has specific duties to the people of South Carolina that you have to perform, that is with or without me doing right on a given day." He likened himself to King David in the Bible, who, as he put it, "fell mightily, he fell in very significant ways, but was able to pick up the pieces."
King David? As in Christ's ancestor? Quite a comparison. The point is that powerful people rapidly lose a sense that the usual rules should also apply to them. We've seen balanced-budget congressmen take massive bribes, zero-tolerance governors patronize prostitutes, family-friendly senators seek anonymous liaisons in airport men's rooms - and taxes, you will remember, "are for little people."
Authority can turn anyone into a jerk: a Stanford study found that students randomly selected to supervise others quickly moved into bullying boss mode – taking more than their share of the cookies on the table, chewing with their mouths open, spreading crumbs around. Extreme selfishness is not necessarily something we're born with; it's a learned social norm.
As the governed, we are willing to cut our governors quite a lot of slack. The infidelities of, say, FDR or JFK are generally forgiven because these men gave themselves completely to the job. They took the risks; they never ducked the responsibilities. They knew that we had entrusted them with power - and when they strayed, they strayed as men, not as Biblical monarchs. Not every politician, though, is in their league; this Governor might have better chosen the words of David's predecessor, Saul: "behold, I have played the fool, and have erred exceedingly."
If you enjoy such tales of all-too-human error, you may want to visit my sister site (http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com), where we showcase a new "wise fool" every day.
