When reporter Lisa Ling interviewed Bart Whitaker in 2015, her first question was the one on everybody’s mind: “WHY did you do it?” To this Bart clearly replied that, even more compelling than the pressure to live up to his family’s expectations, the reason for his crime was that he felt unloved at home! Later he even admitted he felt his parents loved his brother more than him and that he envied his younger sibling!
Yet sadly, Bart’s honesty went unnoticed because psychological theory has lagged, and unfortunately failed him. Besides this author and DOLF theory, no system of thinking has yet understood the power of SIBLING RIVALRY and the critical role of Favoritism in personality development. Now DOLF shows how Sibling Rivalry is the seed of most types of good and bad behavior, as well as the features of personality. Much to our surprise, Sibling Rivalry is the psychological dynamic that is responsible for creating the most debilitating mental/emotional problems, and can even be the impetus for drastic actions such as murder or suicide. To his credit though, Bart showed himself to be truthful, lucid and aware of his deepest feelings and motivations, a far cry from the paranoid, delusional young man he was portrayed to be by his psychiatric diagnoses.
After he was caught, Bart does not seem to have felt sorry for himself. Had he been sentenced to death, he probably would have accepted his fate bravely and felt he deserved it. In spite of the common belief that he is a sociopath/psychopath with no conscience about other people’s suffering, DOLF theory informs us that he is actually capable of empathy and does have a sense of propriety. This is because his capability for empathy and sympathy would have been honed during his early years from birth to age five, when he benefitted from the warm relationship with his PLG mother, before his brother came along to usurp that attachment and upset his world. Those early years, though few, are an all-important stage of mental/emotional development. It was a time when Bart established the foundation for his future character structure through his loving connection with his mother, which had the effect of softening and mitigating Anxiety and Anger in his personality structure.
Bart also seems to be capable of remorse. Despite his greed as a young man, as an adult now, he is no longer gripped with the selfishness, possessiveness or materialism of the past. Rather, he shows himself to be remarkably sober, mature and relieved to have been caught. The DOLF explanation for this change of heart would be that he experienced “a rude awakening”. This is a point of development of consciousness that is reached when a person is deeply immersed in the Mind of a Child, but reality suddenly hits and plunges the person into the more advanced psychological state called the Mind of an Adult. The rude awakening consists of an abrupt reckoning that comes with startling events such as Bart’s capture and imprisonment, and causes a swift transition in thinking, snapping the person out of the Mind of a Child, causing the person to wake up and perceive life in terms of logic, rules and social reality. It ultimately results in a greater recognition of the suffering and needs of others, and a willingness to give up one’s own needs to comply with the greater demands of real life.
On reaching this more mature mental/emotional state, Bart could not help but recognize that the LOVE he once sought through SIBLING RIVALRY is now impossible to attain. Not only is this because his mother is no longer there to provide that LOVE (childish dependent thinking), but because he has so thoroughly messed up his social position that he will no longer be treated gently by the greater society, or as he was used to being treated by his nuclear family (adult reality-testing thinking).
As discussed in another blog, it is the natural inclination of any parent to threaten, punish or enforce consequences on their child when s/he behaves badly. Therefore when we adopt a reward-and-punishment protocol, we learn nothing new except that if we administer punishment, we should do it humanely. Moreover, if we believe in consequences for one’s behavior, one would assume that Bart would have absorbed this idea at a young age, or at least understood it by adolescence. He could have mastered the concept through his religion, through the good examples set by his parents and others, or through normal socialization that happens with age. However, regardless of his good upbringing and proper exposures, Bart had apparently NOT absorbed the consequences-for-behavior paradigm! We find instead that he was blind to the real world around him.
DOLF informs us that he was too socially immature and consumed by the Sibling Rivalry of his childhood to have Intellectually digested the social message about consequences-for-behavior. It was only when he was stunned by the traumatic events of a trial, incarceration and public humiliation, that were the real consequences of his actions, that he became mentally and emotionally altered. These facts of reality ignited his consciousness about the real world around him, provoking his rude awakening, and catapulting him into the Mind of an Adult. It is a psychological milestone which, by the time of the interview with Lisa Ling, he seems to have genuinely reached.
Despite conventional thinking that Bart is incorrigible then, DOLF informs us that Bart is most likely no longer the person he used to be. In fact, DOLF predicts that he would probably be a good candidate for rehabilitation. For Bart, as for any person who turns to criminal activity, the cycle of discontent began with Anxiety over the loss of LOVE from his PLG mother when his brother arrived and interfered with that attachment. When this Anxiety brewed until it became extreme, it whipped up a storm of Anger. This combination of Anxiety and Anger began to overtake Bart’s Emotional structure and lasted from age five to his teenage years, keeping him within the Mind of a Child. He did not advance psychologically until later with the shocking reality of his capture, trial and imprisonment. This rude awakening brought on a new mental/emotional state marked by Intellectual reckoning, leaving behind Emotional dominance and bringing on an abrupt transition to the Mind of an Adult. It was at this point that progression to the Emotional stage of Depression was finally enabled.
Depression is the end stage of the cycle of Emotions that are dominated by Anger. It is the point where sympathy and empathy for others takes over. At this stage the Anger that was directed outward at others is redirected back inward against the self, making possible the acceptance of fault, regret, and remorse for one’s actions.
We can assume that Bart’s Depression was, and has always been, profound. As a child he kept it bottled up and far from view. However, it festered and was behaviorally expressed in his early days as delinquency. When his initial Anxiety bubbled over into Anger, it interfered with his psychological development, preventing maturity. Anger was expressed through his elaborate lies and cover-ups which made obvious his underlying mental upset, that resulted in various diagnoses. Our clue that Depression was buried deep below from the beginning was Bart’s poor performance in school, personal sense of failure and extreme social shame for not living up to his family’s expectations. We can imagine that all along he bore considerable social embarrassment, a sense of inadequacy and poor self-esteem. These feelings were due to his deep-seated jealousy and perception of Disfavor compared with his younger brother, which was the initial source of his deep, long-term Depressive disposition.
Finally, we can compare Bart with Ted Kaczynski, who also had a sweet-tempered brother much younger than himself. However, Bart’s character evolution is very different. In Ted’s younger years he did express feelings of jealousy of his brother David, indicating he was lucid at that time. However, judging from the latest declarations that Ted made in the film titled “Unabomber: In His Own Words” (2020), Ted persists in promoting his belief in his political manifesto as the reason for his actions, and seems to have less insight into his motivations of envy and jealousy of David. Bart on the other hand has undertaken more mature efforts to reform himself through acts such as extending his good will to help others and trying to improve prison conditions.
