Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:25 PM by Gene

Bernie Madoff, seeking to atone for an unatonable life, tries redemption through news hacks, starting with mixed results. The opening grafs, however, give us pause, and far more than the story itself:

Bernard L. Madoff is in therapy. Each week, he waits for the signal that prisoners are allowed to leave their housing units, then he walks the five minutes from his “room,” as he calls it, to the psychiatric unit at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina, where he can unburden himself. The sessions are often teary.

“How could I have done this?” he asks. “I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?”

In some ways, Madoff has not tried to evade blame. He has made a full confession, telling me again and again that nothing justifies what he did. And yet, for Madoff, that doesn’t settle the matter. He feels misunderstood. He can’t bear the thought that people think he’s evil. “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as,” he told me.

And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She said, ‘You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.’” Madoff paused as he related this. His voice settled. He said to me, “I am a good person.”

This uncomfortably reminds us of Pat Robertson's idea of being born again, which did not preclude Hitler or Stalin from being "saved". If anyone can be saved there is no salvation. Psychotherapy is a secular religion, delivering faith through self-esteem. Woodster has been a believer for decades which did not stop him from being a total pervert. Bernie's following the same well-rutted (no pun intended) path. The only honest answer would be to admit that yes, Bernie, you are a sociopath -- and worse -- but that does not prevent you from seeking even the very limited redemption you deserve. That Bernie's session passes for psychotherapy shows the limits of false gods.