Society of sociopaths

People are always asking what a society of sociopaths would look like. As i have suggested before, there already is a society of sociopaths. It is the Dutch. And I'm not the only one who has suggested that the Dutch are as cold and calculating as they come. A libertarian blogger posting about the proposed universal health care in the United States writes:

If the public sector atrophies, the scope for manipulation broadens, because the information about what's available outside the public sector shrinks. Nor is this just crazy speculation. I actually think it's pretty reasonable when conservatives worry that the Dutch attitudes towards euthanasia are influenced by the burden old people and severely disabled children put on the public purse. I don't see how they could fail to be.

What then does a society of sociopaths look like? The Dutch are very efficient, utilitarian, and all of them ride bikes. They invented several of the world's evils including things like slave trade, diamond trade, and imperialism. They're also very tolerant, traditionally a haven for religious minorities like the soon-to-be American pilgrims. Once you're too old to be functional to society, you kill yourself, always with one eye on the bottom line, e.g. gay okay but old decrepit, not so much. And they're firm believers in the free market. Not so bad, is it? I mean there are tradeoffs in everything, right?

Politically calculating

I've been swamped with work lately and in boredom found this article on the new tell-all book about Barack Obama.  The book includes descriptions about Obama from several people that knew him in his younger days, including contemporaneous accounts about him from his ex-girlfriends letters and diaries.


"The success of 'Dreams' has given Obama nearly complete control of his own life narrative, an appealing tale that has been the foundation of his political success. But Maraniss's biography threatens that narrative by questioning it: Was Obama's journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?" Dylan Byers and Glenn Thrush write.

Obama granted Maraniss a 90-minute interview, some surmise in an effort to control his image. Cooke's diary entries, however, reveal that Obama's struggle over what to reveal has been ongoing -- since his youth.

"Friday, March 9, 1984 It's not a question of my wanting to probe ancient pools of emotional trauma ... but more a sense of you [Barack] biding your time and drawing others' cards out of their hands for careful inspection -- without giving too much of your own away -- played with a good poker face," she wrote.  "And as you say, it's not a question of intent on your part -- or deliberate withholding -- you feel accessible, and you are, in disarming ways. But I feel that you carefully filter everything in your mind and heart -- legitimate, admirable, really -- a strength, a necessity in terms of some kind of integrity. But there's something also there of smoothed veneer, of guardedness ... but I'm still left with this feeling of ... a bit of a wall -- the veil."

Doesn't this sound like a sociopath?  I have read a lot of people calling Obama a sociopath before but have never really put much stock in it until now.  Let's just say I wouldn't reject the thought of him being a sociopath, and I mean that in the nicest way.

Anxiety vs. fear (part 2)

There was an interesting article in the NY Times about the difference between fear and anxiety a little while ago.  Here is how they described it:

You are taking a walk in the woods ― pleasant, invigorating, the sun shining through the leaves. Suddenly, a rattlesnake appears at your feet. You experience something at that moment. You freeze, your heart rate shoots up and you begin to sweat ― a quick, automatic sequence of physical reactions. That reaction is fear.

A week later, you are taking the same walk again. Sunshine, pleasure, but no rattlesnake.  Still, you are worried that you will encounter one. The experience of walking through the woods is fraught with worry. You are anxious.

Human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it.

What is the difference between anxiety and fear?

Scientists generally define fear as a negative emotional state triggered by the presence of a stimulus (the snake) that has the potential to cause harm, and anxiety as a negative emotional state in which the threat is not present but anticipated. We sometimes confuse the two: When someone says he is afraid he will fail an exam or get caught stealing or cheating, he should, by the definitions above, be saying he is anxious instead.
***
The automatic nature of the activation process reflects the fact that the amygdala does its work outside of conscious awareness. We respond to danger, then only afterward realize danger is present.


Every animal (including insects and worms, as well as animals more like us) is born with the ability to detect and respond to certain kinds of danger, and to learn about things associated with danger.  In short, the capacity to fear (in the sense of detecting and responding to danger) is pretty universal among animals.  But anxiety ― an experience of uncertainty ― is a different matter. It depends on the ability to anticipate, a capacity that is also present in some other animals, but that is especially well developed in humans.  We can project ourselves into the future like no other creature.

While anxiety is defined by uncertainty, human anxiety is greatly amplified by our ability to imagine the future, and our place in it, even a future that is physically impossible.  With imagination we can ruminate over that yet to be experienced, possibly impossible scenario. We use this creative capacity to great advantage when we envision how to make our lives better, but we can just as easily put it to work in less productive ways — worrying excessively about the outcome of things. Some concern about outcomes is essential to success in meeting life’s challenges and opportunities. But at some point, most of us probably worry more than we need to.  This raises the questions: How much fear and worry is too much? How do we know when we have skipped the line from normal fear and anxiety to a disorder?


And of course the line between fear and anxiety is not always clear either.

I thought that the article made an interesting point about the human ability to predict the future.  It's odd that I have cast myself in the part of oracle in my life -- an amateur fortune teller.  I guess it's because I thought it would be powerful to know the future.  I've gotten better over the years to the point where now every time that I get burned in a prediction it's been because I've failed to take into account how truly unpredictable other human behavior can be.  The more burned I become, the more reluctant I am to stick my hand in the fire.  I can't decide whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.    

Dichotomy

From a sociopath reader:

I've been thinking about this for a long time. There's a dichotomy that almost seems to be a contradiction in the way I feel. These are like two sides of a coin, opposite, but neither could exist without the other. These are my views of the world, and how I fit into it. 

The first is the macro-view, where I see everything from so far away that people turn into little specs barely visible to the eye. Humanity as a whole becomes completely insignificant. Even the infinite, God, the universe, and everything, shrink into irrelevance. I float in a void. An empty vacuous abyss. There's nothing around me. I have no body, there are no sounds, no feeling - I'm neither hot nor cold, because I don't feel. I'm purely an entity, observing from the beyond, and the only thing to observe are the little people, their god, their society, their universe, off in the distance, like a child watching ants in their colony. 

When I'm in the void, I'm separated from humanity, and I look down from the outside. I'm no longer part of this, but an outsider. The world shifts from first person to third person. 

The second view is micro-view, where I penetrate so deeply into the world that I see everything in extreme detail. Like in the movies when Peter Parker first wakes up the day after being bitten, or when somebody becomes a werewolf. All of my senses become hyper-acute. I no longer focus directly at anything, and instead let my vision widen. I see things with my subconscious, and anticipate actions before their required - as if I've shifted backwards a brief glimpse in time. When I feel like this, the world becomes very organic and material. I reach out and touch things, and absorb the sensations. I feel the power in my body. I sense people's emotions and reactions. I feel the intense pleasures and pains in my own body. 

I think I'm a dichotomy of emotions and this physical body. I feel no traditional empathy for these people, and I don't feel like I'm in the same sphere emotionally or spiritually. I have a deep intellectual understanding of these ideas, maybe more so than most people, but for me, they're mere philosophical concepts. I've attempted to seek spirituality, but all I've come up with are formulas. Possible algorithms, like solutions to a problem in programming to explain it all. Open mindedness is the greatest of all forms of disbelief, and I'm non-committal to the point of exasperation. 

Despite this, I am here and now in the flesh. Despite the philosophical constructs I build up to entertain myself, the present feels very real and very - present. Despite the emotional crevice between me and others, I'm not unaware of their emotions, and I soak them up like a thirsty sponge. Part of my mind is infinitely distant, while the other part is infinitely close. I crave her flesh. I crave the pain, and the orgasmic rush of wrath. 

I feel like this dichotomy, although opposite, is at it's core, one in the same. Just like a buddhist monk, who experiences the infinite beauty of world through utterly forgoing human desire, I feel much the same. This isn't simple emotional distance, but a glimpse of how the infinitely far is also infinitely near. At the exact same time, at any one time in all of eternity, I'm both completely outside of everything, and deep inside of her soul. I'm both the darkness in the beyond, and a flesh eating virus consuming her from within.

Sociopaths in the news

Flies: Just like us?

"Researchers have found that flies are hard to swat because they are able to calculate an escape route within milliseconds of spotting a threat."