48 Laws of Power, animated

This was educational:

Quote: Destruction

"Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power, but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.”

Power for the sake of power?

From a sociopathic identifying reader on what's the point of it all:

I have been a frequent reader of the sociopath world blog and for a long time it has helped me to organize my own thoughts but... I feel that there is a problem that I simply cannot tackle. For years I've had a bloated sense of ego, I suppose. I mean, my successes, however insignificant they may appear to others, are very important to me to a point that I am constantly boastful of them. It's not just minor things like winning a game or getting that oh so important promotion at work. Those things are minuscule at best to me. I'm talking about a span of a few years where I went head to head with, who I now believe, to be a fellow sociopath.

At the time I was not aware of my mental state. Sure, I did know I was different but to what extent I neither understood why or cared to find out. It was during this time that I met him. We started off as good friends and with time that friendship devolved as I watched him take advantage of his friends. He eventually hurt someone I considered to be a sibling to me. Really... I looking back I don't think I confronted him because I cared about her. I think I was just looking for a fight. I confronted him despite his friends chiming in, trying to ridicule me. I remember vividly being unconcerned about them... They didn't matter to me. I came for a reason and it certainly didn't involve any of them. That's when I picked up on his constant lying.

I recall going out of my way to be everything he wasn't. I wanted to prove that he was evil and that by some arbitrary reasoning I instead was good. If he was going to lie to his friends, I would focus on blunt honesty. If he was going to throw his friends away, I was going to be loyal. The one thing I couldn't simply throw away was manipulation. He and I both did that... and though I showed these traits of honesty and loyalty, they were driven by an honor code that I would simply cast aside if it failed to benefit me.

I can already tell that at this point I'm rambling like a mad man but my history with him brings that out in me. Which leads to the problem... After about a year into our rivalry I was diagnosed with ASPD. At the time it was something I resented... "There was noting wrong with me." I thought. To be labeled by such an ugly term such as sociopath didn't, at the time, benefit me at any capacity. I went on acting as I had before without dwelling on it much. After all, I was already occupied with trying to be two steps ahead of the guy plotting two steps ahead of me at all times. I knew this... I knew I had to be able to adapt. To take whatever he threw at me and toss it back. Something that he never quite managed to do himself. There was a sort of mutual respect that he and I shared despite displaying ourselves as hating one another. I remember having an intense reaction to him at even his mention but it was fleeting and could not be maintained no matter how hard I tried. I wanted to cling to this feeling. I'm not sure if it was hate or adrenaline... but I was addicted. It just couldn't last, I'm afraid. I remember purposefully coming up with bandaid solutions for the stuff he would stir up. Prolonging our fighting just so that I could plan the next of our battles. Unfortunately, I had to put an end to it for good so I planted seeds all around me. Suggested that he was evil and that those who would side with me would be "safe". Needless to say, the ones he had wronged easily turned. Before long I had amassed a powerful enough army to take him down. Disgraced, he fled... but after that I've lost all of my motivation.

I've ignited smaller wars over the years but not one person has ever been the challenge that he was. Then there was no one left to fight at all... I feel like I've been wasting my potential but when I chase those feelings of fulfillment and power I promptly lose interest. I've tried looking for enemies but it turns out when you're actively searching for a fight you only find losers. I've tried making friends thinking that I'd find acceptance or something of substance to distract me but I find myself incapable of maintaining them. I lose interest in people just so easily now that I don't know if I have any worthwhile friendships to hold onto. I even once tried to start a cult but my lack of motivation struck and it fell apart within a couple of days.

I'm afraid that I'm losing my touch and I don't know where to turn to gain the motivation I need to do anything. I thought it was depression but don't you have to feel sad when you're depressed? If that's the case I really don't think I could manage being that for as long as I have. If I have to sum up the way I feel in tangible words for me, it would be boredom. I'm bored. I put so much focus on what I was doing back then that I cannot take my mind off of it. I am stuck on what was rather than what is and instead of chasing something of substance I gain momentary ego trips when I reminisce on something that's long gone. I honestly don't know what to do and that bothers me.

M.E.:

Yeah, I think you might be bored because there's no real meaning in cultivating power. It's engaging while it lasts, but ultimately it is no longer compelling to us. Perhaps we mature or perhaps we grow in wisdom, but we can suddenly see more clearly that there's not really any point to it. But what else will occupy our mile a minute thoughts? What other projects can engage us with such captivation? This, I believe, is the almost universal problem of the maturing sociopath.

Also, I should say, as a descriptive matter it is absolutely true that sociopaths behave in a way that indicates that there is pleasure in cultivating power for its own sake (i.e. the pleasure of ruining someone is not about the ruining but about an expression of power). It's only as a prescriptive matter that I suggest to sociopaths that the pleasure from cultivating power may not continue to be enough to get you out of bed in the morning, the older you get.

Power and obsessions

A reader asked me, "I enjoy having power over people, and I think that this power will help me in life, however since it is important to me I worry about the possibility of losing it. What are some ways you have lost power or what are ways that I could end up losing power?"

I responded: Interesting question. Probably the most common way for me to objectively lose power is to suffer some sort of defeat or loss, like an accident or getting fired, but usually those don't bother me too much. The losses of power that bother me more are the personal ones.

The most unpleasant loss of power to me is being rejected by someone as a despicable human being. I hate that, it makes me very very angry to the point of a violent all consuming rage, which is its own form of loss of power.

Another form is having an obsession or an itch that can't be scratched. There are a few people that have somehow planted themselves in my mind. To them, I am nothing. I don't even know how they got there in my mind, except that to some extent I invited them there. I wonder about them, what they think about, what they do. They are my playthings in a different way than most -- they're fun and interesting to me because they are *not* mine, and the game is to acquire them. It's not unpleasant, this feeling of obsession. It actually gives me some insight into how to do that to other people -- burrow my way into their minds and take up residence there. There have been times when the obsession starts to get out of control, though. If it gets bad enough, I have learned to talk myself down from the obsession by remembering that they are not really the person that exists in my mind, that I am really obsessed with a figment of my imagination that I have populated with the image of that person. So there's both control and powerlessness in an obsession. Have you seen the movie Vertigo? A delicious depiction of obsession, my favorite movie for how unapologetic it and the characters are about indulging their respective obsessions (and for Bernard Herrman's exquisite score).

Sociopathic savior

When I was growing up I had such insight into the psyches of others (and when I was younger, not enough of a filter from saying creepy things to people's faces), that people would tell me that I should be a psychologist. Often I feel like people either seek me out because they are interested in having me see through them or someone else they're trying to understand, or at the very least it contributes a lot to what my friends seem to get out of our relationships. That's why I thought this email from a reader was an interesting take on the reasons why a sociopath might choose to help people:

First of all, I just wanted to thank you so much for Confessions... I personally have several male sociopath friends (we just attract each other!), but no fellow female sociopaths have ever come my way. As such, I was naturally curious how other women display their sociopathy, and how the display of my own characteristics "measured up" to other females. I'm happy to say that much of your book felt like stream of consciousness coming from my own mind. There were even a couple of adages or quotes I found within your book that I've been saying for years, haha. It was a pleasure to read.

All gushing, flattery, and gratitude aside, I wanted to take a chunk of my own life and throw it to the wolves, as it were ;) I'm not asking for clarity on whether or not I'm a sociopath (I know I am, and I don't need "reassurance" for such things), but I suppose I would like to initiate a bit of discussion among your readers as to how sociopathy can play out.

Growing up, I had all of the classic symptoms of a sociopath. I used my parents' divorce to manipulate, guilt-trip, and ultimately profit from both parents, I would get in fights at school, covering up quickly by claiming the other child wanted me to hit them because they wanted to see what I was learning in martial arts, I learned how to fake guilt in that "I guess I took it too far," with crocodile tears to boot. I would lie about the most mundane of things, like whether or not I had brushed my teeth a particular morning, and sometimes I would lie just to create emotional outbursts "for the fun of it" (ie: I was homeschooled by my stepmom, who I despised entirely, so occasionally I would come to my dad in tears, confessing I had "failed" a really important test, that I felt like I wasn't taught any of the material covered. In reality, I always got very high marks, but I gained a sort of satisfaction in watching my dad blow up at my stepmom for "ruining my education.")

All of this took a turn when I was sixteen, when my dad, in one of his outbursts, killed my stepmom, baby sister, and himself. (I was also shot, but survived.) I was "sentenced" to court mandated therapy, which was entirely necessary as I was having flashbacks, nightmares, etc. But my therapist noticed something: aside from my dad--who, at very least, had sociopathic tendencies, though his primary dx was bipolar... he was incredibly intelligent, however, and through his own wits and ways of "bending the law," he went from being a high school dropout, son of a hooker to a multimillionaire by his early twenties. I still admire and respect him, probably more than any other person--aside from my loss of this influential role in my life, I did not grieve. I was not concerned for my losses, except the man I saw as most contributing to my education and growth (he spent hours every week teaching me about social manipulation, business strategy, etc)--someone I had seen as "useful." My therapist chalked this up to a delay in grief caused by shock, but five and a half years later, I have never been so much as concerned to think of the others. 

Though I was not grieving, being in therapy taught me how I "should be" grieving. My therapist used a lot more suggestive questions than she probably should have, likely to try to draw me "out of my shell" or to help me put a name to emotions I was "experiencing," but didn't "understand." So I created a persona based on this "grieving me." My performance won me a full-ride scholarship to college, many families opened their homes to me, and I noticed something odd--people came up to me, seemingly out of the blue, to talk to me about their problems, thinking "if anyone could relate," it would be me.

Having been in therapy, and having keenly observed my therapist, I simply played counselor to these people. And they would look at me and tell me how much I inspired them and gave them hope... Several told me, eventually, that had it not been for me, they would've killed themselves. The power and influence I had over these people was astonishing--and I loved it. 

So I used my education to get my BA in psychology, and in the near future, I will be pursuing a MA in Grief and Trauma Therapy. I currently volunteer once a week at a grief center for teens (I specifically work with teens who have lost someone to suicide, which earns me double points for 1. working with "the toughest cases," and 2. for being "strong enough to open up to relate in such a personal way to these teens"). I also work at a residential treatment center for adolescent girls who have been through trauma and abuse. Everyone I tell my persona's story to gushes at me in admiration, and more often than not, opens themselves up ever so completely to me. They trust me, in many cases, more than anyone else they've ever met. Trusting someone is laying down your defenses completely and being bareboned honest, fearless of the consequences. People trust me so much as to let me in where no other may go. I saved their lives, and in essense, now control their lives. The power of that is incredibly intoxicating.

So, yes: these days, I help people. And I am damn good at it. But I'm tired of hearing so many people (mostly empaths and wanna-be-sociopaths) tell me that no "real" sociopath would want to help people the way I do. Even some sociopaths are skeptical. But the display of sociopathic behavior is rooted in what we want. We want power. For me, I've found the most success in gaining power through letting people trust me on what they believe to be their own terms. Yes, I could ruin them, and that is a delicious fantasy (and one, admittedly, I play out now and again with lovers)... but if I did so with clients, my reputation could be ruined more than it would be worth. By being "responsible" with my power, I gain more of it. 

I'm curious what you and yours would remark on my endeavors. I don't help people because I feel "compassion" or any nonsense like that. I don't feel any sort of "trauma bond" either. Simply, I'm good at something, and people admire, praise, and depend on me (to the point of stopping themselves from suicide) for that. Any other "savior sociopaths" out there? (After all, being a Savior entails being someone's God...)

An aspie's view of sociopathy

From an Aspie reader reader:

I found your blog by chance, a week or two ago, and can't help but feel intrigued. I have Asperger's syndrome (or as the next version of the DSM has it, "autism spectrum disorder") and the experiences you describe seem to have as many similarities to as differences from my own. 

We both find it necessary to mask ourselves for daily life because most people, most of the time, don't want to know what we're really like. They want an interface they know how to use, and an impression they can easily categorize. I don't switch masks with the fluidity of a sociopath, nor do I have as large a repertoire to choose from. I'd be willing to bet that I have to put more conscious effort into each one, so once a given mask passes I have greater incentive to stick with it and practice until perfect. (I don't know what you look like without yours, but at times when I can't maintain a mask I've been told that I either don't emote, or that the other (neurotypical) person doesn't know how to interpret my body language.)

Changing contexts, some facets of my personality behind that mask may fold away and others unfold such that people in either seem to form substantially different impressions of me, but I don't make a conscious decision to change what aspects I have on display, nor bother with deception. I simply omit what isn't relevant.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I lack the typical sociopaths' need for stimulation and excitement, nor do any of your examples mention sociopaths with a typical autistics' sensory hypersensitivities. Sitting in a quiet room with dim lights, my experience is finally not *over*stimulating.

In that vein, there's one thing that I really don't understand. What do sociopaths get out of manipulating or otherwise having power over other people? What about it interests you? To my view, people are mostly boring and interacting with them is a nontrivial drain on my resources. (There are rare exceptions to that rule, and I've married one. He describes me as "asocial".) And so I have to ask: Why bother?

I look forward to your answer.

My response:

Thanks for this! I think that sociopaths get a lot of things from power. They get a sense of connection and intimacy with another person. They get a sense of purpose or sense that they are a being in the world that acts, not just gets acted upon. I think for a lot of sociopaths there was some sort of childhood trauma that made them feel like they weren't the masters of their own destiny. Not everyone is bothered by this, but I think for sociopaths it goes too strongly against their megalomania. But these are sort of just guesses. For me I have felt the need for power as a basic need, like the need for love or acceptance must be for most people, but I'm not sure why. Thoughts?

Sociopath quote: self-control

“Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.”

--Seneca



UPDATE: I've been thinking why I have bothered to learn self-control. I think the obvious is that I am able to accomplish much more in my life if I don't give into every impulse but instead spend just a moment contemplating the potential ramifications. Another less obvious reason is that if I don't have control over myself, other people will be able to exploit those vulnerabilities in me by intentionally triggering me. I know all about this because I intentionally trigger people's rages myself, to provoke what most people consider "disgusting behavior".

(I love how the "victim" is smiling in this video.)

Temptation and opportunity costs

I'm currently a point that a lot of my socio readers are when they write in to me. I am tired, bored, my life seems meaningless. For the past couple weeks I have only been going through the motions, using all of my will power to do the smallest things to sustain my career, my reputation, my relationships, my wealth, but I feel like it is all pointless, like trying to bail out the Titanic. Nothing seems sustainable to me right now. Everything seems like a potential liability or accident waiting to happen.

It's disturbing to me how demanding my id is right now. I have no desire to maintain anything I've built, to continue living this particular role. But I know that at my age and station, I don't have many more do overs, if any at all. And I wonder this current situation warrants one. I think if I could just start playing a game or otherwise indulging some of my more basic needs, it will distract me from my ennui and disgust with life and I'll be able to keep things together.

Making things worse is that there is already a perfect target on the horizon, someone who could start falling into my hands today if I want. This person could ruin me. I don't remember the last time I felt so enticed by a person, but in all other respects this person could not be worse for me to target, not if I want to keep living roughly the same life that I have been living. So that is the issue. I need a game to amuse me, something to engage me in this life I have, but in order to maintain this life I can't target my most appealing opportunity.

Do you know who I now understand? I understand all those people who are married, maybe kids, some stable normal life and along comes some siren, some cad that they feel inexplicably drawn to. They're seduced. They fight the feelings for a while, they remind themselves of what it would mean to give into temptation, that it's not worth it. But while they are fighting so hard to keep their normal, stable life, they start to resent that life. They resent their spouse and their kids and everything that is keeping them from indulging in what they really want to do. So just at that moment when they need to be trying their hardest to keep what they have, they are valuing that life the lowest. This decreased opportunity cost makes taking the low road a fait accompli.

This is a horrible situation. I'm so disgusted right now. I feel like my "normal" life has made me too much of a eunuch, but also not enough of a eunuch that I am immune to destructive temptations. Socio readers with uncontrollable bloodlust, peadophiles, I feel your pain.

Sociopath quote: power as art

I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

-Napoleon Bonaparte

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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Ennui of a puppetmaster

From xkcd:
I was explaining to a friend last night that although part of me likes the fact that she is damaged because her vulnerability gives me a degree of power over her, it is not necessarily something I need to consummate to enjoy. Sometimes, like in physics, potential power can be just as enjoyable as actually exercised power. In the same way that a classic car collector can enjoy cars he never drives or a wine collector enjoys wine he never drinks, sometimes the achievement of some advantage, either known or unknown by the other person, is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.

Quote: Power to the daring

"Power is given only to those who dare lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters: to be able to dare."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Flexing power

I thought this Hyperbole and a Half comic, "Menace," had hilarious parallels to the mind of a sociopath child (and even sociopath adults). My favorite insight on self-imposed limitations:

The dinosaur costume was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. The previous Halloween, which was the first Halloween I could actually remember, my parents had dressed me as a giant crayon, and the whole experience had been really uncomfortable for me.

But being a dinosaur felt natural.

And powerful. 

The feeling had been slowly intensifying ever since I put the costume on that morning, and, as I stood there in the middle of the classroom, staring off into the distance in an unresponsive power trance, it finally hit critical mass.

I had to find some way to use it. Any way. Immediately.

The other children screamed and fled. The teacher chased me, yelling at me to stop. But I couldn't stop.  I was a mindless juggernaut, a puppet for forces far greater than myself. I had completely lost control of my body. 

All I knew was that being a dinosaur felt very different from being a person, and I was doing things that I had never even dreamed of doing before.


Of course, I had always had the ability to do these things — even as a person — but I didn't know that. I'd just assumed that I was unable.  As a dinosaur, I didn't have any of those assumptions.  It felt like I could do whatever I wanted without fear of repercussions.

The repercussions were also exactly the same as they were before I became a dinosaur.

I just experienced them differently. 

On why in order to fully feel our power, we often feel the urge to destroy or wreak havoc:

The thing about being an unstoppable force is that you can really only enjoy the experience of being one when you have something to bash yourself against. You need to have things trying to stop you so that you can get a better sense of how fast you are going as you smash through them. And whenever I was inside the dinosaur costume, that is the only thing I wanted to do.

On losing the power of the dinosaur costume:

I was infuriated at the injustice of it all. I had become quite dependent on the costume, and it felt like part of my humanity was being forcibly and maliciously stripped away.  I cursed my piddling human powers and their uselessness in the situation. If only I could put on the costume . . .  just one more time.

Approval vs. power

A reader wonders why people do the things they do and how that affects the relationships they form:

It’s like there are 2 ways to be with people

1. Approval seeking
2. Power seeking

We are a mix of those 2 to different degrees with everyone we interact with, which is exactly why we’re different depending on who we’re talking to . It's usually all subconscious, it’s like our personalities form hierarchies everywhere.

1. Does a lot of stupid things for approval, and has since the dawn of time. Like the things people did for kings and god and people that stay in relationships that aren't any good for them, hazing, the desire to be in the ‘inner circle’ regardless of how bad it is. It explains people like Snooki. These people let others mold them. This also explains the existence of the all-forgiving, all-accepting powerful paternal father figure also known as god in most cultures, people create someone that gives them approval whenever they want, and I think people need it to be happy and to function, like sort of a feedback that they’re valuable people.

Also 1 seems to be stereotypical woman behavior and 2 seems to be stereotypical guy behavior, they seem gender related but it’s actually only so because (generally) women are more submissive and men are more assertive.

So most emotions seem to come out of interactions with 1. and 2. These are extreme examples, but people mix and match these and things come out more balanced.

Like
1-1: to equal degrees is where true bonds form, like real friendship and love.  But the problem is that people have to make themselves slightly vulnerable and easy to take advantage of for this dynamic to work. This is where functional families are too, regardless of who they are they get down or up on each others levels and reciprocate. Reciprocation is the best way to have 1-1 and it works with uneven playing fields.

1->2: the 1 will feel like the 2 is emotionally unavailable, distant, they will get clingy onto them, which will reinforce 2’s behavior and drive them further away. This is why most guys are all like ‘bitches be crazy’. They don’t understand that it’s a normal response to neglect. The 1 will wrongfully take this personally, and think there is something wrong with them. They will want to re-balance things but will usually go about it the wrong way. The irony is the harder they try, the more they'll be a nuisance.

2->1: 2 will experience boredom with 1, so they’ll either end the relationship, enjoy the attention, or reduce 1 to more and more of a functional role. Which is why most girls are like ‘guys are assholes’. 

So say 1 gets reduced to more and more of a functional role, the gap between 1 and 2 widens. There’s obviously a sub/dom thing going on, but at a certain point, sub/dom turns into inferior/superior in the mind of the dom, this can also happen if people are told they’re more worthy than others,and if they believe it. They start to build their self-worth on that concept that that’s when things unhinge because for them to feel worthy, they need to keep that dynamic in place. If 1 tries to reassert themselves, 2 will resent that [like with all the hateful comments on yt when porn stars try to conduct a normal interview, proving that they have a brain] and crack down further. This may be because the animal brain finally gets engaged, and that part deals with dominance, hatred and lust. That exact thinking pattern is present in racism, lust, treatment of POWs, in domestic abuse, murders, gang members, bullying, it explains why those hot-headed middle easterners are so angry at everyone that’s female or not of their religion, why some people have authoritative personalities, why bosses can be intolerable. They’re all equally as bad. There’s also a study that proves that people like to exert more and more dominance over people that allow them over time, not out of malice but out of a want to control, and they sort of gain joy out of that process. The people that do this in a way that's not considered socially acceptable are the sociopaths. Pure 2.

So why do people do this if it’s bad? Complete dominance over someone is euphoric, seriously, it feels amazing in a twisted kind of way. It induces guilt and regret for a regular person, but sometimes the (empath) 2s come up with ways to circumvent that and allow them to act that way at will, to their benefit. These excuses make no actual sense, but if they’re socially supported that’s all that matters (screw logic if we can feel good about ourselves is a stance people love to take, case in point: religion). These excuses are : She/he’s black, she’s a whore she/he’s a communist, she/he’s dumb, she/he is an enemy of god and in the way of my blissful afterlife where 7 virgins will cater to all my needs. In this way, they can relish in the fact that they think they're better than at least one person, the ego boost that it gives them, and can partake in the illusion that it actually means something.

2-2: Could be bad, like wars and armed standoffs. But could also result in competition, which is what pushes thing forward the fastest. Competitions don’t always endanger lives and they’re not always about interpersonal relationships so they're not always destructive.

I've learned not to be angry despite this, it’s not really peoples fault that they are SOO easily manipulated by their context, I mean it is but it's clearly not an individual problem since it's so widespread, it's more like the wiring. It seems that it’s just  what happened to their brains after experiences, outcomes, and places where social reinforcement was applied. It makes a ton of evolutionary sense, not actual sense, and that can only work if people see things through a self-serving perspective. 

The Gervais Principle (part 3)

A reader sent me a link to the latest edition of the Gervais Principle. From the reader:

Have you read the final installment of the Gervais Principle? You mentioned the previous installments in older posts, but the last section is much more insightful and relevant to sociopaths than the previous ones. 

Venkat basically describes sociopaths as ultimate social nihilists that progressively learn that every single ideal or moral calculus that gives meaning to human existence as social constructs. In the end, sociopaths find immense freedom in a world that has no meaning except what they create or choose to acknowledge. This means that sociopaths can still coexist peacefully (social contracts), both with empaths and other socios. I identify very strongly with this nihilism, and I have frequently mentioned the idea of an absent god before I read the Gervais Principle, but I also feel that you do not identify very strongly with this description, given your adherence to the tenets of Mormonism, unless I am misinterpreting you. What are your thoughts? 

Here's what I replied (makes the most sense if you read the article first):

Thanks for this! I enjoyed it a lot. I especially liked this part:

"The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors."
I feel like a lot of sociopaths stop at that stage for a while. They give me a hard time for revealing their methods, as if playing a game was any less meaningless than everything the empaths are up to.

I think it is that sort of nihilism that allowed me to write the book and be so flippant about it and possible ramifications. Some people think my zen attitude is from my mormonism. Maybe. It is true that if you believe in religion then a lot of things in life just don't matter much. But if you don't believe in religion, then for sure nothing in life matters much. So that's where I sort of am on Mormonism. I'd like to think that I will continue to exist forever and be a god. If that doesn't work out, oh well, there's really no such thing as "wasting time" doing one thing over another. But I do think my conception of God is really different from most people's, including most Mormons. The Otherwise Occupied God, or the God who might care about us but has the perspective to not really be as caught up as we think he might be in what all we get up to (or he cares about different things than we think).

The article's most basic argument, in reference to the emphasis that the "losers" place on social interactions and the accompanying emotional checks and balances:

But by their very nature, emotions overweight social behavior over material substance. Having a $100 bill thrown contemptuously at you hurts. Being politely handed $10 feels good. The Loser mind, predictably, sees the first act as a slight and seeks revenge, and the second act as nice and seeks to repay it.

We saw an example from the The Office last time. In the sales-commissions episode we find that for the support staff, sharing in the salespeople’s commissions and being thrown a thank-you party are emotionally equivalent. Both heal the emotional rift, but one leaves the salespeople vastly better off.

The Sociopath as Priest

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are  able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms.  The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

Sociopaths encourage this mode of processing by framing their own contributions to betrayal situations as necessary and inevitable. They also carefully avoid contributing to the emotional texture of unfolding events, otherwise their roles might come under scrutiny by being included in the emotional computations.

For theatrically skilled Sociopaths, other non-vanilla affects are possible. “Divine anger” (Jan),  ”charming but firm elder” (Jo Bennett) and “unpredictable demigod” (Robert California) are examples. These framing affects are designed to shape outcomes without direct participation, in ways that cannot be achieved by neutral low-reactor affects.
***

These non-vanilla personalities operate by adding to, or subtracting from, the net emotional energy available to go around in Loser emotional calculations, but without intimate involvement. Sociopaths basically create the emotional boundary conditions of Loser life in simple or complex ways, depending on their skill level.
***
Guilt is the one emotion that Losers cannot always resolve for themselves, since it sometimes requires quantities of forgiveness that mere humans cannot dispense, but priests can, as reserve bankers of the fiat currencies of Loser emotional life.

Other good nuggets:

• manufacturing fake realities is very hard. But subtractive simplification of reality is much easier, and yields just as much power.
• Sociopaths exercise agency on behalf of others. They do not grab power. Power is simply ceded to them.
• Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.  Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.
• There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities 
• Non-Sociopaths dimly recognize the nature of the free Sociopath world through their own categories: “moral hazard” and “principal-agent problem.”  They vaguely sense that the realities being presented to them are bullshit: things said by people who are not lying so much as indifferent to whether or not they are telling the truth. Sociopath freedom of speech is the freedom to bullshit: they are bullshit artists in the truest sense of the phrase.
• Non-Sociopaths, as Jack Nicholson correctly argued, really cannot handle the truth. . . . The truth of values as crayons in the pockets of unsupervised Sociopaths. The truth of the non-centrality of humans in the larger scheme of things.
• When these truths are recognized, internalized and turned into default ways of seeing the world, creative-destruction becomes merely the act of living free, not a divinely ordained imperative or a primal urge.  Creative destruction is not a script, but the absence of scripts. The freedom of Sociopaths is the same as the freedom of non-human animals. Those who view it as base merely provide yet another opportunity for Sociopaths to create non-base fictions for them to inhabit.
• Morality becomes a matter of expressing fundamental dispositions rather than respecting social values. Kindness or cruelty, freely expressed. Those who are amused by suffering use their powers to cause it. Those who enjoy watching happiness theaters, create them through detached benevolence.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

As I wrote a like-minded friend, I have been recently thinking about the world of Oz. In Oz there are apparently witches, both good and bad. Anything remarkable that exists in that world is consequently attributed to witchcraft. When Dorothy shows up and kills the wicked witch, everyone is dying to know whether she is a good witch or a bad, as if her being any sort of witch is a foregone conclusion. The most interesting thing to me, though, is that their leader, the "wizard," is not a wizard/witch at all, but a charlatan who plays on their expectations of what their world looks like. He is a stranger in a strange land, someone from a different world, who doesn't think like they do. He uses misdirection and cheap tricks like gunpowder pyrotechnics and robotics to imitate the sort of witchcraft that the Ozians take for granted as an everyday occurrence. The wizard does all of this to hide in plain sight, but not just hide -- thrive. And not just thrive -- rule. My friend wrote:

Very interesting parallel there. If we wanted to play with the analogy a little, we could say that the Wizard is a literary example of how some sociopaths operate, including the whole “he isn’t as powerful as we thought he was” motif. He manipulated the people with the real magic. It was as if his deception was itself a kind of magic, potent enough to make himself the most powerful man in Oz. That is totally apropos. As you know, I believe that power is in one sense an illusion. I believe that people are always freer than they think they are. Because they believe in the social rules and roles and because their emotions almost compel them to even, they create power structures out of thin air, with most of them at the bottom of said structure. Awfully convenient for those at the top, don’t you think? ;)

This may all be true, but perhaps the strangest aspect to the story of the wizard is that he willingly gives up all the power and fame and return home to his native sepia-toned Kansas via the hot air balloon. This suggests a preference. Whether for loneliness or emptiness or meaninglessness, that for all of the wizard's success at assimilating into the world of Oz, he would rather live in a black-and-white world where everyone is just like him rather than all the color and glories of Oz.

And was he a good wizard or a bad one? Dorothy accuses him of being a bad man, to which the wizard responds, perhaps slyly, "Oh no, my dear, I'm a very good man; I'm just a very bad Wizard." Does he mean that he is not really a wizard at all, or that he realized that the wizard he was pretending to be was best categorized a "bad" wizard in the same way that Glinda is a "good" witch and the witch of the west was "bad"? Combined with the fact that he leaves Oz, maybe he thinks that it was "bad" to pretend to be a wizard in the first place, although he probably just fell into the role (literally), given his circumstances.

Power corrupts

Organisms can be very adaptable to fit the needs of a particular situation. For instance, certain animals like clownfish will even change gender depending on the exigencies of procreation. Humans change too. Even neurotypicals can become monsters in the right circumstances. Interestingly, it's not just childhood abuse and abandonment that sets neurotypicals off but (wait for it) -- power and the sense of moral superiority, inter alia, to which it leads. From the Wall Street Journal:

Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity. One recent study found that overconfident CEOs were more likely to pursue innovation and take their companies in new technological directions. Unchecked, however, these instincts can lead to a big fall.

But first, the good news.

A few years ago, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, began interviewing freshmen at a large dorm on the Berkeley campus. He gave them free pizza and a survey, which asked them to provide their first impressions of every other student in the dorm. Mr. Keltner returned at the end of the school year with the same survey and more free pizza. According to the survey, the students at the top of the social hierarchy—they were the most "powerful" and respected—were also the most considerate and outgoing, and scored highest on measures of agreeableness and extroversion. In other words, the nice guys finished first.

This result isn't unique to Berkeley undergrads. Other studies have found similar results in the military, corporations and politics. "People give authority to people that they genuinely like," says Mr. Keltner.

Of course, these scientific findings contradict the cliché of power, which is that the only way to rise to the top is to engage in self-serving and morally dubious behavior. In "The Prince," a treatise on the art of politics, the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli insisted that compassion got in the way of eminence. If a leader has to choose between being feared or being loved, Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. Love is overrated.

That may not be the best advice. Another study conducted by Mr. Keltner and Cameron Anderson, a professor at the Haas School of Business, measured "Machiavellian" tendencies, such as the willingness to spread malicious gossip, in a group of sorority sisters. It turned out that the Machiavellian sorority members were quickly identified by the group and isolated. Nobody liked them, and so they never became powerful.

I feel like every high-functioning sociopath realizes this and either acts genuinely friendly, or is very stealthy about hiding any malicious intentions. It continues:

Now for the bad news, which concerns what happens when all those nice guys actually get in power. While a little compassion might help us climb the social ladder, once we're at the top we end up morphing into a very different kind of beast.

"It's an incredibly consistent effect," Mr. Keltner says. "When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive." Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

***

Although people almost always know the right thing to do—cheating is wrong—their sense of power makes it easier to rationalize away the ethical lapse. For instance, when the psychologists asked the subjects (in both low- and high-power conditions) how they would judge an individual who drove too fast when late for an appointment, people in the high-power group consistently said it was worse when others committed those crimes than when they did themselves. In other words, the feeling of eminence led people to conclude that they had a good reason for speeding—they're important people, with important things to do—but that everyone else should follow the posted signs.

[E]ven fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn't, then the facts are conveniently ignored.
***
[P]eople in power tend to reliably overestimate their moral virtue, which leads them to stifle oversight.

Hypothesis: neurotypicals are currently in power as a mob/group. They are easily corrupted by that power in ways that make them behave more like sociopaths, but unlike sociopaths they unquestioningly assume that they are always acting for the good of humanity because they are "good people," whereas sociopaths can never do "good" because they are "bad people".

Sociopathic altruism?

A female reader who relates to the sociopathic mentality writes about a lot of things that I relate to -- being a disruptive force in my family and provoking people emotionally to manipulate them until I grew older, then started using my people reading and manipulation skills to smooth things over. And now I am the peacemaker/powerbroker in the family:

I've been reading through your blog, and feel a lot of familiarity in your posts and fact section.

I lie constantly and can't control it, I have a grandiose opinion of myself, many admirers both male and female, a chameleon personality, and in the past have been prone to a quick temper--saying intentionally and specifically hurtful words to the people closest to me. As a defense mechanism usually, but I always knew how to hurt someone the most, how to put the ball in my court; how to manipulate and control. It was the worst with my family when I was younger. I've since learned this is rather unacceptable behavior among other people.

I often think to my childhood. My father was an angry man, his own father suffered from PTSD and my father inherited some violent tendencies and anger management problems. The thing is, I'm much smarter than he is--much smarter than most people, and when I was a young powerless little girl and into adolescence...well it grew to be a very dramatic power struggle. Shouting matches, crying, drama, anything to break him out of his rages--sometimes outrageous displays of emotion(though, intentional).

At the current age of 22, I now have the most influence on every member of my family. Thing is, I had to, in order to repair what was so broken and dysfunctional. Get into everybody's head, maybe control them, manipulate a bit sure--but I fixed things, eventually. Seemingly altruistic, but when it comes down to it, isn't altruism also selfishness?

I remember when I was 7 or 8, my grandma died. I'd met her many times, she'd given me plenty as a child. We were at her funeral and my mom was crying, leaning on a church pew. I had no real tears, but I forced myself to bawl that day. I remember thinking simultaneously, while crying and exaggerating my shoulders, that this is what she wanted from me though I had no inner emotional response. I knew instinctively that this would also benefit me. Turns out I've been painting the picture of myself as a very loving, innocent, and caring person for a very long time...

I'm wondering if sociopaths ever use their abilities to altruistic extremes, in which the end result benefits them, as well as everyone else? I also feel like I have the capacity to feel strong feelings, but it's more of an intensity. Romantic relationships can be very intensely positive, and intensely negative. When sleeping with people I either have absolutely no attachment to the person, or an unhealthy obsession.

Found your website and was engrossed. I've always known I was different. When my roommate found out she was pregnant, and told me and my friend--she was crying hysterically and my friend was visibly distressed. I didn't react at all. I had to think first how I was going to react to this, what was appropriate, because I had no immediate response. It didn't affect me at all.

I have consciously on several occasions admitted to myself that my personality can very dramatically change depending on my location, situation, and who I'm surrounded by. I somehow easily win people's trust, respect, and admiration--I seem to cater my approach to each specific individual, and it doesn't take me much time. I always chalked it up to being charismatic and understanding, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm a sociopath who's grown up and figured out how to truly blend in and still get everything I want--or something else.

I've been viewing life from this perspective lately and have realized that I am different, but have been lucky enough to be surrounded by certain influences and experiences growing up which have developed into a great and generous moral code I can abide by. 


There has been much growth and change since my teenage years especially, and even now and this past summer, such constant change. Seriously, thank you for all the work you've put into your site, it's contributed a lot to my growth and helped me navigate my own relationships and the way I am. Understanding. I didn't understand why I am the way I am for so long. 

Can sociopaths be altruistic? I don't know, but they certainly can be very effective at relating and interacting with people. I was listening to a talk from LDS primary children President Rosemary Wixom in which she discusses trying to think like a child in order to better relate and deal with children. It's such an easy concept but so hard for a lot of people to put into practice. Sociopaths very naturally understand and adapt to the needs of the people around them, though, whether people of different ages, cultures, genders, ethnicities, etc. That's obviously going to be a very useful and welcome trait in almost any situation. It's funny, though, what the reader said about not understanding herself -- I think especially younger sociopaths find it easier to understand other people than they understand themselves.

Sociopathic morality?

This is an interesting summary of the dominant views in the scientific community regarding morality. Many have been discussed here before, including Jonathan Haidt's views on intra-culture morality and Paul Bloom's findings on the moral world of children. I liked this insight into the role that empathy/emotions play in morality vs. logic:

People who behave morally don’t generally do it because they have greater knowledge; they do it because they have a greater sensitivity to other people’s points of view. Hauser reported on research showing that bullies are surprisingly sophisticated at reading other people’s intentions, but they’re not good at anticipating and feeling other people’s pain.

The moral naturalists differ over what role reason plays in moral judgments. Some, like Haidt, believe that we make moral judgments intuitively and then construct justifications after the fact. Others, like Joshua Greene of Harvard, liken moral thinking to a camera. Most of the time we rely on the automatic point-and-shoot process, but occasionally we use deliberation to override the quick and easy method. We certainly tell stories and have conversations to spread and refine moral beliefs.

When you put it that way, it seems obvious why sociopaths would struggle with having an internal sense of morality.

My favorite part of the article, though, was this critique:

For people wary of abstract theorizing, it’s nice to see people investigating morality in ways that are concrete and empirical. But their approach does have certain implicit tendencies.

They emphasize group cohesion over individual dissent. They emphasize the cooperative virtues, like empathy, over the competitive virtues, like the thirst for recognition and superiority. At this conference, they barely mentioned the yearning for transcendence and the sacred, which plays such a major role in every human society.

Their implied description of the moral life is gentle, fair and grounded. But it is all lower case. So far, at least, it might not satisfy those who want their morality to be awesome, formidable, transcendent or great.

It's an interesting argument. I see this skewed focus frequently with religious people. They often tend to want to focus on the nice, nondescript aspects of their religion where God is behaving well, not killing children or drowning the world or enacting all sorts of vengeance. But most versions of God have some sort of edge to them. All versions of God are powerful beings, after all. They wouldn't remain powerful without doing certain things to cultivate that power, including being awesome, formidable, transcendent, and great. If we think that godliness is a virtue, then it would also be a virtue for us to cultivate power and try to become more awesome, formidable, transcendent, and great. And you don't necessarily get to be that powerful by rolling over and being "nice" in every situation.

I find it really disingenuous for people to focus on the "nice" side of morality without giving any consideration to the obvious ying to the yang (unless it really is true that all conservative people are godless and going to hell). As a religious person myself, I sometimes have people get on my case about some of the more aggressive, competitive, and antisocial things that I do, claiming that they are not consistent with my religion. I am not necessarily humble the way they expect the religious to be humble (but which is better, to lie to yourself in order to be humble, or to honestly acknowledge both your strengths and your weaknesses?). I can be ruthless and I don't often doubt myself. There are things about me that seem a little too dark and edgy to be the Mormon/Christian I profess to be. But the Christian God can be ruthless too. The Christian God can be all the things that I am, given the right context. I just feel like I am coming at godliness from the opposite end that most people do -- that the cultivating power side of things happens to be my area of expertise and that I need to practice and work at the love side of things. And for other people maybe it is vice versa, but that we'll all eventually meet at our goal in the middle.  

The lure of seduction/rape

I discovered why/when i get the urge to seduce. There are two necessary elements for me: (1) the target is susceptible to seduction, and (2) the target has power over me. If those two requirements are met, I will nearly always feel the urge to seduce. If just one of those elements is present, I might think about it once or twice, but the seduction never holds my interest.

Perhaps this is somewhat related: I think I also discovered why someone might rape (I didn't rape anyone, just a dream). The lure of rape is fuzzier to me than the lure of seduction, but there is also an issue of power. The victim is actively rejecting you. The act of rape negates this rejection, denies the victim even that small control over you.

The downside to rape, though, is that the focus is all on the rejection. In fact, rejection is necessary for rape -- if there was no element of rejection, there would be no reason or opportunity to rape. To be a habitual rapist then, you would have to either be rejected all the time (real rejection), or be so insecure and paranoid to think that people would reject you all the time (perceived rejection). Neither way sounds appealing, or even easy to accomplish. Do habitual rapists seek out rejection or provoke it, just to create the opportunity? I'm much too narcissistic to be courting rejection all the time like that. I don't see why anyone else would do it either unless they had a masochistic streak. In any case, I would never do it myself, it's black magic. But now I can sort of see why others do.