Author of Confessions of a Sociopath M.E. Thomas chats with Dawn and Daniel M. Ingram about psychopaths and meditation, etc. From Daniel's website:
"Meditator Daniel — who started having various energetic phenomena and insights as a kid, and ended up writing a book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha and then co-authored The Fire Kasina with Shannon Stein, and co-founded the Dharma Overground — a fine community of helpful, accomplished, aspiring and diligent practitioners there, and its spirit of mutually supportive dharma is wonderful, and whose writings, podcasts, and other works you will find above in the InteractiveBuddha Menu. I have a vision of how meditation is talked about, taught, shared and practiced that draws from the best of what I have been exposed to and seen happen, a vision that is all about personal empowerment, stripping away dogma and unhelpful taboos, people sharing with each other in ways that are down-to-earth, helpful, and pragmatic, and the vision that it can be done, rather than a dharma world that is mysterious, artificially heirarchical, dogmatic, and secretive."
Daniel's website: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/page-example
Daniel's podcast episode about the Demon Princes and the Institute that we reference: https://soundcloud.com/daneilmingram/the-institute-episode-one
Daniel's book: https://www.mctb.org/
Chapter 30 of the book: https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-iv-insight/30-the-progress-of-insight/
Dawn's article "Is Enlightenment Controlled Psychosis?"": https://impartial-priorities.org/p/is-enlightenment-controlled-psychosis
Previous M.E. video with Dawn: https://youtu.be/35MmoJXYb68
The Clearer Thinking podcast with M.E. that Dawn references : https://podcast.clearerthinking.org/episode/236/m-e-thomas-a-conversation-with-a-sociopath/
The M.E. Thomas Dark Finds podcast that Daniel references watching: https://open.spotify.com/show/0bYBE7bflKAb44NmuA8S6m
Some info on Otto Kernberg's personality development framework: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/otto-kernberg-object-relations-personality-disorders-psychoanalytic-theory/#:~:text=The%20neurotic%20level%20of%20organization,for%20deep%20and%20meaningful%20relationships
Daniel asked Claude AI:
Q: In Jack Vance's series The Demon Princes, the primary plot driving force is revenge on the Demon Princes for the Mount Pleasant Raid on the village that Kirth Gersen's family resided in. I just had a long conversation with ME Thomas, noted psychopath, who stated two really interesting things: that from a psychopath point of view, vengeance makes no sense at all and shouldn't be a motivating factors, and instead should just be the writing of power imbalances, and that The Institute, which in theory was there to prevent lone psychopaths from ending life on worlds with too powerful technologies, actually was a perfect outlet for the need for meaning and purpose to fill the emptiness felt by psychopaths, thus rewriting both narratives around good and evil, psychopathy and morality. Best thoughts?
A: That's a fascinating reframe of Vance's work through a psychopathic lens. Thomas's observations cut to something essential about how different minds construct meaning and motivation.
The revenge angle is particularly striking. Gersen's decades-long quest is built on an emotional continuity that spans years - the sustained burn of loss and injustice that keeps him focused. But if you lack that emotional persistence, if trauma doesn't create lasting motivational structures, then revenge becomes almost incomprehensible as a life-organizing principle. It would be like dedicating your existence to settling a debt you no longer feel owed.
Thomas's reframing as "writing of power imbalances" is more mechanically precise - it's about who has agency over whom, who can act and who must endure. That's immediate, transactional, and doesn't require emotional investment in past events. Much more comprehensible to someone who experiences the world as a series of present-moment power dynamics rather than emotionally-weighted narratives.
The Institute observation is even more intriguing because it suggests psychopaths might actually make ideal peacekeepers - not despite their condition, but because of it. They'd approach planetary-scale threats with clinical detachment, unswayed by the very emotional and tribal impulses that create those threats. The "emptiness" gets filled not with personal vendetta but with cosmic-scale problem-solving.
It inverts the usual moral framework entirely: maybe the emotionally-driven "heroes" like Gersen are actually more dangerous in the long run than the calculating minds who just want elegant solutions to power equations. Vance may have accidentally written a universe where the psychopaths are the true guardians of civilization.
