Sheeple

An empath reader sent this (accurate?) video on how people are manipulated, particularly en masse:

Good intentions not good enough

The other day I was with a group of my relatives. One of the children is a quirky guy, probably could be diagnosed somewhere on the autism spectrum but his parents seem to worry about stigmatizing him with any sort of label. Another adult relative grabbed him in sort of a roughhousing way and the child screamed bloody murder. We were in a crowded place and everyone turned to look at what could possibly cause such a reaction. There should be nothing unusual about a child who does not like to be grabbed by surprise, but I guess a lot of children like it? So people do it and basically expect all children to like it; if they don't they're often labeled "too sensitive" or some other label that shifts the blame on them for their reaction, rather than it staying on the perpetrator where it belongs. Watching this scene, I couldn't help but think about how much I distrust good intentions (I write about it here, the tendency to self-deceive about good intentions here, and the inherent paternalism or one-size-fits-all hubristic approach of many good-intentioned behaviors here).

I'm not saying that the guy who grabbed the child was "wrong", largely because I don't care about the moral rightness or wrongness of such actions (even if morality plays a part in some decisions, I believe that most things in life have no moral implications at all). What I am saying is that the last thing in the world that my little relative wanted to have happen was to be grabbed in that way. The adult of course apologized, but I've also seen people in similar situations defend their position, as if trying to convince the victim that they should toughen up, or that the treatment is good for them (see above re paternalism and hubris), or often the perpetrators seem to honestly believe that the victim actually does like that treatment, but is just being intentionally difficult as a form of politicking or emotional manipulation. Whatever the reason, the violators in these situations (the persons who impose their own will on another person, ignoring the that person's autonomy and volition) often excuse their own behavior or believe that they are not responsible for the consequences of their own actions because that is not what they intended. And that is the most dangerous thing about them.

I really like this quote from C.S. Lewis from his essay anthology "God in the Dock" (1948):

My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

This is a major reason why I am libertarian -- people are bad enough about this without giving them the authority and power of the state to use. 

Power hungry

A reader asks why sociopaths are so power hungry, do I suspect any historical or contemporary figures were/are sociopaths, e.g. Machiavelli, and how to learn to think like a sociopath.

I honestly don't know why sociopaths are so concerned with gaining power. I don't think it is necessarily unique to sociopaths, obviously, but I would say that it seems to apply to the vast majority of sociopaths. Perhaps there is something evolutionarily implicated here, that for the same reasons that sociopaths were evolved to not have a conscience, they were also evolved to crave power?

There's something very primitive about the sociopath's drive for power, like the sex drive, but it can manifest itself in many ways. For instance, I think a lot of sociopaths just want to make people jump, or at least know that they can. Some of them want the classical form of power, for example some political or business position or the money that can buy the power. Some of them, like me, channel the drive for power to include power over oneself, one's impulses and inclinations.

I do think that Machiavelli was a sociopath. There are a lot of people that I sort of suspect are sociopaths, but it's really hard to tell if anyone is without being privy to their thought processes. Anything else is complete speculation. For instance, I got in this idle debate once about whether Angelina Jolie was sociopath leaning. In my mind she had some of the clear identifying factors: creepy attachment to family, volatile, bisexual, and loves Ayn Rand (libertarian leaning politically). The person I was arguing with could not get over her humanitarian work, which to me is a nonstarter because there could be plenty of reasons why she does that. You know? Like why do I write this blog? People always want to know stuff like that, but there could be a million reasons, including accumulating power, respect, being able to influence the dialogue about a particular subject, etc. And with Angelina Jolie, how can you explain the other stuff? Like the fact that she has a look that makes people want to cry and she can be equally seductive with straight women as she is with men? But really I could go either way with her, and without looking inside her head there's no way to know for sure.

There are few people that I would feel confident to say are sociopaths, most of them literary because we actually get to see the "honest" picture of how they think, e.g. Tom Ripley, Cathy from East of Eden, and some others I have mentioned on the blog.

How to learn to think like a sociopath? I don't know, find one to apprentice with? But I would be careful. I think after you learn to think like a sociopath, there is something about you that changes and you can never really go back. I think this is particularly true if you learn to think like a sociopath at a young age and had all of those sociopathic neurological pathways reinforced instead of the "normal" ones.

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Mob mentality

This was another interesting column in the New York Times about the history, origins, and power of fear + mob mentality in the U.S. Normal people sometimes don't like sociopaths because they don't like feeling that they are just a patsy to the sociopath's intrigues. They are hyper focused on thinking that the sociopath is the root to their problems. It may or may not be true that sociopaths are to blame for as many problems for which they are blamed. Historically, however, it is this fear, suspicion, and hate of "others" that not only perpetuates negative stereotypes to the utter disregard of reality, but leaves people open to be a further patsy to those who would capitalize off of their fear. These opportunists may include political or religious leaders, bosses and neighbors, and anyone else that would use your fear to drive their own ascension to power, or even turn other people's fears against you. Here are excerpts from the column:

A radio interviewer asked me the other day if I thought bigotry was the only reason why someone might oppose the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. No, I don’t. Most of the opponents aren’t bigots but well-meaning worriers — and during earlier waves of intolerance in American history, it was just the same.

Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.

Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of Glenn Beck.

Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assaults were possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
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Historically, unreal suspicions were sometimes rooted in genuine and significant differences. Many new Catholic immigrants lacked experience in democracy. Mormons were engaged in polygamy. And today some extremist Muslims do plot to blow up planes, and Islam has real problems to work out about the rights of women. The pattern has been for demagogues to take real abuses and exaggerate them, portraying, for example, the most venal wing of the Catholic Church as representative of all Catholicism — just as fundamentalist Wahabis today are caricatured as more representative of Islam than the incomparably more numerous moderate Muslims of Indonesia (who have elected a woman as president before Americans have).

During World War I, rumors spread that German-Americans were poisoning food, and Theodore Roosevelt warned that “Germanized socialists” were “more mischievous than bubonic plague.”

Anti-Semitic screeds regularly warned that Jews were plotting to destroy the United States in one way or another. A 1940 survey found that 17 percent of Americans considered Jews to be a “menace to America.”

Chinese in America were denounced, persecuted and lynched, while the head of a United States government commission publicly urged in 1945 "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." Most shamefully, anti-Asian racism led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

All that is part of America’s heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals — as in Father Charles Coughlin’s ferociously anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Today’s recrudescence is the lies about President Obama’s faith, and the fear-mongering about the proposed Islamic center.

But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.

Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.

This is why I am anxious in crowds. This is why I am a libertarian. I think I have a healthy fear of persecution that helps constrain any inclination to persecute others. Similarly, I wouldn't mind if the tables were turned on some of those people who are so sure that they know what's right and best for everyone. Maybe if they were on the receiving end of persecution themselves, they wouldn't be so self-satisfied. But I am glad that with the prohibitions on women wearing face veils in France, protests against a Muslim community center in New York, etc., people who would normally consider themselves open minded, inherently "good" and "wise" individuals with clear definitions of "right" and "wrong" are being faced to stare down the barrel of reality.

I smell change.

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?

The morality of libertarians

This will be interesting and relevant to many of you. A reader sent me this article about recent research performed on the moral leanings of libertarians, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology." As described by Reason:

When it comes to morality, libertarians are often typecast as immoral calculating rationalists who also have a somewhat unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research shows that libertarians are quite moral, just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are.

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[T]he study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales and much higher on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity scales. In this case, libertarians scored low on all five surveyed moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” notes the study. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on Harm and slightly above on Fairness. This suggests that libertarians “are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

The Schwartz Value scale measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on Hedonism, Self-Direction, and Stimulation than either liberals or conservatives and they put less value than either on Benevolence, Conformity, Security, and Tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on Power, but like conservatives they value Universalism less. Universalism is defined as “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and nature.” All three put high value on Achievement. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.”

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“Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.

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“Libertarians are high in Openness to Experience and seem to enjoy effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks. In combination with low levels of emotional reactivity, the highly rational nature of libertarians may lead them to a logical, rather than emotional, system of morality.”

Probably the most interesting part of this article, though, was the discussion of the Empathizer-Systematizer scale:

The scale measures the tendency to empathize, defined as "the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion," and to systemize, or "the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system." Libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing—and they scored a lot higher. The authors go on to suggest that systemizing is “characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.” They then add, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’”

Yes, tendency to systematize instead of empathize is something that libertarians, sociopaths, and autistics have in common.

Facebook espionage

This was an interesting NY Times article about how the U.S. government is looking to expand it's intelligence and counterterrorism groups into social networking:

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker.

It would be useful to know, for instance, whether signs of widespread rebellion were authentic or whether they were being created by a fringe group with little real support. Among the tools the successful seeker of government funding might choose to employ: linguistic cues, patterns of information flow, topic trend analysis, sentiment detection and opinion mining.

It's an ambitious goal, but I wonder if this type of thing is more art than science. If someone could accurately predict future trends with a $42 million piece of software (the amount the U.S. government is putting up to sponsor research in this area), then I'm sure that someone would be putting the software to a more lucrative, business or stock related use. The only people who seem likely to volunteer to do such an ill-fated project are the ones who either (1) know that they'll never come up with the software anyway, but don't mind getting paid to spin their wheels or (2) double agents who know that they'll come up with the software and will sell the U.S. government out. But that's the problem with big government is that the bigger it gets, the harder it is to tell what's going on -- right libertarians?

A better use of funds might be to hire young sociopaths to monitor social networking sites and push people into doing one thing or the other. Of course, they could always go "bad" and engage in behavior counter to official policy. Easy solution! Just hire sociopaths to monitor those ones, and so on.

Libertarian leanings

Thanks to the Ludwig von Mises Institute for putting together a massive library of libertarian literature online: http://mises.org/literature.aspx

One reader suggested that for a sociopath like me "who equates feeling 'other' with being an at-risk minority, fear of mob rule and fondness for libertarianism makes sense. But for the sociopath who feels that their cunning and logic and fearlessness make them invincible and all-powerful (plenty of criminal sociopaths fall into this category, I think), totalitarian politics might be very appealing -- assuming, of course, that the sociopaths are in power."

Fascist sociopaths? That's probably the dirtiest thing you could call people in certain cultures.

Are libertarians sociopaths or vice versa?

First let me out myself as being libertarian, but with a little bit of a Burkean twist. for the uninitiated, libertarians are essentially socially and fiscally liberal -- kind of a "don't tread on me, laissez-faire" attitude regarding government interference. I'm a libertarian because my main fears are mob mentality and idiots having power. I think my fear of mob mentality is directly linked to my perception that i am an "other," i.e. sociopath, and a very unpopular one at that. I think a lot of non sociopaths could be afraid of idiots in power and naturally want to decrease the power of government in general, but I don't know.

There has been a lot of rubbish written about libertarians all being sociopaths, but fewer people suggest that all sociopaths are libertarians. I find the first suggestion ridiculous -- there are many reasons to be a libertarian without necessarily being a sociopath. Although if you want to read an infuriating discussion about this, look here. Just a snippet:

Libertarians to make moral judgements, they error on the side of freedom. THAT IS A MORAL JUDGEMENT.

Nonsense. Liking freedom is NOT a moral judgment. This illustrates the point of the study exactly. Sociopaths want to be free to do whatever they want, regardless of the harm they do to other people. All Libertarians are sociopaths, but NOT ALL sociopaths are Libertarians.

The commenters go on to indicate that many other political parties seem to appeal more to sociopaths than libertarianism, e.g. socialism, fascism, communism, and other forms of totalitarianism. Thoughts? Are sociopaths represented in every political belief system? Are they only at the extremes?