Mind-blindness and empathy

Sociopaths can be very mind-blind about certain things, especially the inner emotional worlds of others.  Sociopaths are not the only ones who can be mind-blind, though. Despite normal people's professed empathy, I have noticed before and particularly since the publication of the book that many empaths can't seem to get into the mindset of a sociopath. I think a lot of it also has to do to a tendency that we all have to project our own feelings and thoughts about a situation onto another person.

I talk about this a little bit in the book, about how I used to think that people were just like me until basically my late teens and early 20's. And now that I am a little more aware, I realize that I make frequently incorrect assumptions about the inner worlds of others, but I'm happy to be corrected when appropriate. I notice it in others as well but some people aren't open to correcting their misperceptions. This particular brand of mind-blindness is often mixed with a touch of xenophobia, and a dash of hypocrisy, seeing the apparent flaws in someone else's worldview without acknowledging the limitations of one's own perception. The evolutionary plus of this blend of mind-blindness+xenophobia+hypocrisy is that it promotes social conformity. It makes people feel so sure of themselves that they don't think twice about forcing others to conform, even if it means something so drastic as killing them (witch hunts, Inquisition, modern religious states where we stone people, etc.) And conformity leads to a greater sense of cohesion amongst the rest of the group, which can be socially beneficial, particularly in times of war.

Although I acknowledge that humans being able to unscrupulously enforce their will on other people can sometimes benefit society, I don't really like being the target of this sort of social influence and scrutiny. It's why I sometimes don't like being around other white women -- they feel like we're similar enough that they know all about me, even sometimes believing they know me better than I know myself. They also feel invested enough in me and how I reflect on them and greater womanhood that if I step out of line, I could face severe consequences (Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons?).

I've been thinking a lot about mind-blindness with the publication of the book and subsequent promotional activities. I've been thinking about my own mind-blindness, including the ways that I have not been able to predict the spectrum/proportion of people's different reactions (In the past few weeks I've learned more about why exactly people hate sociopaths than I did in the past few years of the blog). I've also been a little amazed at other people's mind-blindness, as evidenced by the all-over-the-map reactions to the book and promotional activities -- seemingly contradictory things like thinking that I am both the epitome of evil (a clear and an imminent threat to society) and that I'm also a fraud.

I wonder about the nature of the fraud accusations. When people say "fraud," does it only mean that they believe the word "sociopath" does not accurately apply to me? Because I'm pretty upfront that maybe it doesn't and maybe I've been misdiagnosed and who knows what that word means anyway and the diagnostic criterion are notoriously subjective, but isn't that itself an interesting thing to note about sociopathy? That if someone like me can be diagnosed a sociopath, then maybe it doesn't mean much when other people are involuntarily diagnosed sociopaths and kept in prisons because of it? If they think I am a fraud because I am lying about what's happened to me in my life, I am surprised because I don't find my experiences to be particularly outrageous or extraordinary. But I guess when you say "diagnosed sociopath" people expect to see a particular thing and when they don't see that thing, instead of thinking to themselves -- maybe my idea of a sociopath is not accurate, maybe I am not an expert at identifying sociopaths -- they instead conclude, this woman is a fraud. Maybe because they would rather live in a world in which they can rely on their own gut assessments about people, and me not being what they expected me to look/act/sound like is a direct challenge to that worldview? Interestingly, I've gotten a lot less pushback about who I say I am from non-Americans and from men, presumably because they're projecting less of their own characteristics and worldview on me?

Maybe people are unimpressed or disgusted by sociopath behavior, but I'm recently not that impressed by empath behavior. If empathy only applies to people who look and act just like you (and even then, is largely based on inaccurate projections of one's own worldview on another), then what is so special about empathy?

The adaptable brain

If you believe that there is at least some genetic component to sociopathy, is it possible to find a workaround? This recent Oliver Sacks article from the New York Times discusses the incredible adaptability of the brain:

While some areas of the brain are hard-wired from birth or early childhood, other areas — especially in the cerebral cortex, which is central to higher cognitive powers like language and thought, as well as sensory and motor functions — can be, to a remarkable extent, rewired as we grow older. In fact, the brain has an astonishing ability to rebound from damage — even from something as devastating as the loss of sight or hearing. As a physician who treats patients with neurological conditions, I see this happen all the time.

For example, one patient of mine who had been deafened by scarlet fever at the age of 9, was so adept at lip-reading that it was easy to forget she was deaf. Once, without thinking, I turned away from her as I was speaking. “I can no longer hear you,” she said sharply.

“You mean you can no longer see me,” I said.

“You may call it seeing,” she answered, “but I experience it as hearing.”

Lip-reading, seeing mouth movements, was immediately transformed for this patient into “hearing” the sounds of speech in her mind. Her brain was converting one mode of sensation into another.

In a similar way, blind people often find ways of “seeing.” Some areas of the brain, if not stimulated, will atrophy and die. (“Use it or lose it,” neurologists often say.) But the visual areas of the brain, even in someone born blind, do not entirely disappear; instead, they are redeployed for other senses. We have all heard of blind people with unusually acute hearing, but other senses may be heightened, too.
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The writer Ved Mehta, also blind since early childhood, navigates in large part by using “facial vision” — the ability to sense objects by the way they reflect sounds, or subtly shift the air currents that reach his face. Ben Underwood, a remarkable boy who lost his sight at 3 and died at 16 in 2009, developed an effective, dolphin-like strategy of emitting regular clicks with his mouth and reading the resulting echoes from nearby objects. He was so skilled at this that he could ride a bike and play sports and even video games.

People like Ben Underwood and Ved Mehta, who had some early visual experience but then lost their sight, seem to instantly convert the information they receive from touch or sound into a visual image — “seeing” the dots, for instance, as they read Braille with a finger. Researchers using functional brain imagery have confirmed that in such situations the blind person activates not only the parts of the cortex devoted to touch, but parts of the visual cortex as well.

One does not have to be blind or deaf to tap into the brain’s mysterious and extraordinary power to learn, adapt and grow. I have seen hundreds of patients with various deficits — strokes, Parkinson’s and even dementia — learn to do things in new ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, to work around those deficits.

That the brain is capable of such radical adaptation raises deep questions. To what extent are we shaped by, and to what degree do we shape, our own brains? And can the brain’s ability to change be harnessed to give us greater cognitive powers? The experiences of many people suggest that it can.

Can my brain adapt too?

Famous sociopaths: Ayn Rand?

A reader sent me this selection from Ayn Rand, which he thinks seems to indicate a lack of human emotion:


Just as the pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is an automatic indicator of his body’s welfare or injury, a barometer of its basic alternative, life or death—so the emotional mechanism of man’s consciousness is geared to perform the same function, as a barometer that registers the same alternative by means of two basic emotions: joy or suffering. Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him—lightning calculators giving him the sum of his profit or loss.

But while the standard of value operating the physical pleasure-pain mechanism of man’s body is automatic and innate, determined by the nature of his body—the standard of value operating his emotional mechanism, is not. Since man has no automatic knowledge, he can have no automatic values; since he has no innate ideas, he can have no innate value judgments.

Man is born with an emotional mechanism, just as he is born with a cognitive mechanism; but, at birth,both are “tabula rasa.” It is man’s cognitive faculty, his mind, that determines the content of both. Man’s emotional mechanism is like an electronic computer, which his mind has to program—and the programming consists of the values his mind chooses.

But since the work of man’s mind is not automatic, his values, like all his premises, are the product either of his thinking or of his evasions: man chooses his values by a conscious process of thought—or accepts them by default, by subconscious associations, on faith, on someone’s authority, by some form of social osmosis or blind imitation. Emotions are produced by man’s premises, held consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly.

Young at heart

I came upon this quote from Charles Baudelaire that “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.”  It made me think of the many ways in which I am inherently childish.  Sometimes I'm childlike in a way that gives me a competitive advantage, e.g. the creative, outside the box thinking to which Baudelaire alludes.  Sometimes I'm childish in less advantageous ways, like being overly reckless and self centered.


They say that sociopaths mellow with age.  The other day I was remembering some of my more stupid escapades, realizing that it has been at least a few years since I have done something whose stupidity is almost wholly due to stunted emotional growth.  I read recently in the New Yorker that even Tucker Max, one of the founding authors of the genre "fratire" and widely known and loved for his immense immaturity, has given up his former partying life, takes yoga classes, and is seeing a psychotherapist in the hopes of finding balance. [Is Tucker Max also a sociopath?  According to his website: I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead.] 

Interestingly, the people who have fallen in love with me (as opposed to obsession) have essentially fallen in love with the child in me.  People associate childlike qualities with a certain innocence.  And there is something charming about a grown person, brilliant and successful, ruthless and hard, also showing the sometimes naïveté and guilelessness of a child.  There was something about that contrast between the unyielding me that the rest of the world sees versus the soft me that most were blind to that appealed to my lovers' protector/nurturing instincts.

In the book The Little Prince, a pilot, long at odds with the seriousness of the adult world, gets stranded in the desert and meets a boy prince who is able to see past the unimportant details of life that cloud grown up eyes and see what is most essential about the pilot.  In a Scientific American blog post entitled, "The Big Lesson of a Little Prince: (Re)capture the Creativity of Childhood":

Saint-Exupéry’s larger point about creativity and thought is difficult to overstate: as we age, how we see the world changes. It is the rare person who is able to hold on to the sense of wonderment, of presence, of sheer enjoyment of life and its possibilities that is so apparent in our younger selves. As we age, we gain experience. We become better able to exercise self-control. We become more in command of our faculties, our thoughts, our desires. But somehow, we lose sight of the effortless ability to take in the world in full. The very experience that helps us become successful threatens to limit our imagination and our sense of the possible. When did experience ever limit the fantasy of a child?

The article goes on to describe an experiment in which the control group was asked to respond to the writing prompt, "imagine school is cancelled for the day", while the experimental group was asked to respond to the same prompt while pretending they are 7 years old.  Those writing as a 7 year old showed significantly more originality of thought: "Imagining yourself a child, it seems, can quite literally make your mind more flexible, more original, more open to creative input and more capable of generating creative output."

Interestingly the full Baudelaire quote suggests that the ideal is a childlike state of mind with all of the experience and knowledge we have gained as adults: "Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."  I hope this is what is meant by sociopaths "mellowing" as they age.

Volume and nuance of emotions

Once upon a time I was discussing music over lunch with a graduate school advisor. I mentioned to him that my biggest strength as a musician was having a highly tuned ear, being able to distinguish between slight changes in intonation that most people would not be able to perceive, much less know in what direction the pitch moved and by how much. Later in the conversation I asked him to repeat himself and explained that I have a hard time hearing in crowded, noisy places. He looked confused.

"I thought you just told me that you have good hearing."

I was about to explain when I saw him understand, "Oh, you have bad hearing, but it is nuanced." 

Yes! Exactly. I have bad hearing but it is extremely nuanced. In fact, sometimes I have wondered if my hearing became nuanced to compensate for my hearing being bad. 

I was remembering this story recently and thinking, maybe this is a good analogy for how I interpret emotional cues. People always wonder, how is it that sociopaths are so mind-blind about somethings but can be so uncannily perceptive about others. I've had a hard time explaining it myself. But maybe it is just this: that it's difficult for me to hear certain things and not others because they are actually unrelated in a way that is not obvious to the average observer. Maybe the emotional cues I am picking up on use a different sort of perception, like less empathy, more sheer observational skills. Or it's more something that can be learned with practice, like reading people's microexpressions? 

Or maybe it's hard for me to pick up on big picture things, like which emotion, and it's easier for me to pick up on small emotional nuances, like how that emotion is affecting a person's motivation in that moment. Maybe it's like Newman says, that sociopaths can do quite well with emotion as long as their attention has been directed to it (e.g. talking with a person one on one), but if there is too much background noise distracting, it will go completely over my head? 

I haven't refined the theory yet, but I feel there is something to it.

Paradigm shifts

I hesitate to write about this because it's both probably too personal and too random for anyone to relate to. But I hope there is a more meta thought about changing paradigms and what that actually means that can translate via the too specific story.

Recently, I was out with a sort of former seduction target turned long time friend, who has over the past few years retreated more and more from life. We met up randomly and by chance with a third, a stranger. The night with the third turned into hijinsky fun, the stuff of silly comedies with an undercurrent of sexual energy. The stranger skilfully flirted equally with me and my friend, keeping an amazing balance. Whenever my friend would withdraw, the stranger was there to draw my friend back in. It made me think -- this must be exactly how polyamorous relationships work. I've had multiple relationships going on at the same time, but never the same relationship with multiple people (sad!), so it was fascinating. It made a lot of sense too. Whenever there is a weak relationship between any two of the three, that weak pairing needs to be shored up with one on one connection between those two. And although I wasn't really that interested in either one by themselves, but there was something about the combination that was charming to me -- seeing them through each others' eyes.

The stranger ends up too drunk to drive home, but everyone has a car and everyone is far from home. It came down to a coin flip, but eventually it gets decided that my friend will drive the stranger home and crash there for the night, to come back in the morning to retrieve the third car. Of course they hook up, but I was surprised that they didn't come up for air for several days.

I'm genuinely happy for my friend, because I feel like it's an end of retreating from the world. And my world paradigm told me, "say you're happy for them both and then back away." But then I had this crazy thought just pop in my mind -- if I back away, this relationship will fail. Why? My mind reasoned, as if on its own, based on my observations of what I knew about them (I had tried to set the stranger up with other random strangers that night, so the stranger told me what to look for) there were at least a half a dozen ways in which my friend failed to meet the stranger's expectations. But I did meet those particular criteria. Same for what my friend is looking for -- so many things the stranger failed at, that I happened to meet. And there was also a half dozen ways that I failed to meet what each of them were looking for in ways that they matched for each other, most importantly that I was actually looking for a romantic relationship with either of them.

I had these thoughts in what felt like a moment of clarity for me, like seeing a math problem a different, better way. My mind told me that the optimal thing to do in terms of their relationship wouldn't be to adopt the societal paradigm of don't-be-a-third-wheel paradigm, but to continue to fill each's needs in the way that their new partner couldn't or didn't want to.

Again, you can imagine what happens here. I try to explain this to my friend, just to see if the idea rang true to my friend too. But it sounds too crazy, doesn't it? I mean, clearly I'm just jealous, anyone would think. Another friend told me in an IM conversation re the situation "i think you struggle a lot with things not being about you and it's something to work on." At first I wanted people to understand, wanted to explain how this was not about me this time or about jealousy.* And I did try to explain to my friend, until I realized -- this is my paradigm, and it is the truest I know, but it is not anyone else's. Neither one of them owe you any understanding of your paradigm and they certainly don't owe you adopting yours as their own, even if you believe that your paradigm would benefit them more in this situation.

Because as much as my concept of the self has been flexible, it has traditionally driven me literally crazy when people have denied a truth that seemed so self-evident. I've often fancied myself a sort of Galileo, preaching the truth of my righteous paradigm to the blind who will not see. A defender of truth. But after this recent experience, I understand that the truth is not necessarily always relative, but that in certain circumstances the truth hardly matters. Someone else's beliefs and/or their ability to have their own beliefs matter much more than any attempt at objective truth. And after I had that paradigm shift about third wheels and polyamory so suddenly, I wonder what paradigms of mine are next to shift? Finally, I see that I need to figure out a better way to allow my paradigms to shift in the future without upsetting others who aren't ready/wanting/asking to shift theirs.



*I've never been looking for love. I've never felt like that was true, at least. I've been attracted to people plenty, and I'm certain that I've wished in some way for them to reciprocate the intensity of my feelings, but even that has been oddly not a big deal to me. If it's not a straight seduction in which their passion for me are the "points" I'm scoring in some sort of game with myself, I've always been more into my own feelings for someone I care about than caring exactly how much they care back at me. Maybe this is why I have only experienced very pale shades of jealousy in my life, because what I want most are my own feelings of passion, not someone else's feelings for me. 

Liar, liar

One thing I am always a little surprised by is how horrified people are of the idea of sociopath mask-wearing and lying. Doesn't everybody? The main difference seems to be what sorts of things people bother to lie about? Maybe not even that? From the New Yorker blog's "How to Tell When Someone is Lying":

People lie all the time. According to the psychologist Robert Feldman, who has spent more than four decades studying the phenomenon, we lie, on average, three times during a routine ten-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance. Hardly anyone refrains from lying altogether, and some people report lying up to twelve times within that time span. I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yes, great place. Trust me: we often lie without giving it so much as a second thought.

We lie in most any context—Feldman’s work has turned up frequent lies in relationships ranging from the most intimate (marriage) to the completely casual. Some lies are small (“You look like you’ve lost a bit of weight”) and some bigger (“I did not have sex with that woman”). Sometimes they are harmless, and sometimes they are not.

Interestingly, although it is very difficult to become a personal lie-detector, studies suggest that people are pretty ok at subconsciously detecting lying:

In a series of studies, out this month in the journal Psychological Science, the Berkeley team had students watch a video of a possible criminal who was being questioned about stealing a hundred dollars. As in an actual interrogation, the suspect responded to both baseline questions (“What are you wearing?” “What’s the weather like outside?”) and target questions (“Did you steal the money?” “Are you lying to me right now?”). Half of the potential criminals were lying; half were telling the truth. Each participant watched one truthful and one deceptive video.

Next, the students completed a simple assessment: Were the pleaders in the videos telling the truth? Just as in prior studies, ten Brinke’s subjects, when asked direct questions, did no better than chance at determining who was truthful and who wasn’t.

But then the students participated in one of two unconscious lie-detection tasks. In each, they saw still photos of the two pleaders alongside words that were associated with either truth, such as “honest” and “genuine,” or lies, such as “deceitful” and “dishonest.” Their goal was to categorize the words as indicative of either truth or lies, as quickly and accurately as possible, regardless of the face they saw along with it. If “genuine” flashed on the screen, they would press a button to classify it as a truth-category word as soon as possible.

When the researchers dug deeper, they saw that the participants’ unconscious instinct fared far better: in both studies, they were significantly faster at properly categorizing lie- and truth-related concepts when those concepts were presented with the lying or truthful face, respectively, from the video. Seeing a liar’s face made people faster at classifying lie-related words than truth-related words—and seeing a truth-teller had the opposite effect. “When you see a liar’s face, the concept of deception is activated in your mind even if you’re not consciously aware of it,” ten Brinke hypothesizes. “It’s still unclear just how high a percentage of lies our unconscious mind is able to sense accurately, but discrimination is definitely occurring.”

Unconscious discrimination seems to play out in more life-like scenarios, too. In a series of prior studies, conducted by an unrelated group at the University of Manheim, the psychologist Marc-André Reinhard and his colleagues found that the ability of student judges to detect deception improved drastically if they were given time to think—but only if, in that time frame, they thought about something other than the case they were judging. If they had to make an immediate judgment, they did no better than chance. The same was true if they were allowed to deliberate consciously. But when they were kept from consciously deliberating, by, for example, completing a demanding word-search puzzle, their accuracy improved significantly. Reinhard concluded that, in the unconscious-deliberation condition, the brain had had time to integrate the subtle cues that our conscious mind can’t quite perceive into a more complete judgment.

Why is it so hard for people to spot sociopaths then? Could it be that some people are willfully blind?

Compliance

When I first started learning about statistics, I learned that surveys often reflect a selection bias in that the middle class will gladly sit there and answer questions when asked politely, but for whatever reason the upper and lower classes will not. So what you get with a survey is the opinions of the middle class, and none of the opinions of the upper and lower classes.

I saw a film about the middle class recently while visiting a friend who thought that I would love it. It's called Compliance. It's a fictionalized version of true events. A prankster calls up a fast food establishment (McDonald's in the original story), pretending to be a police officer, and gets the manager of the restaurant to require one of her employees to submit to a strip search, among other things.

I was so glad that I watched this film in the theatre. People were upset. A few groups got up and left. Several times people yelled at the screen, "Stupid!" or "What an idiot!" It was too funny hearing people's reactions. For some reason the audience members seemed to think they were immune to similar acts of stupidity. I think this NY Times article does a good job of describing the phenomenon: 

“It’s the kind of story that’s a blip, a headline you read and go, ‘Wow, that’s crazy,’ ” Mr. Zobel said. “Then you say, ‘That would never happen to me’ and move on. But I was thinking more and more about it, and it seemed to encompass a lot of things about people’s relationship with authority.”
***

To write the ingratiating, threatening lines of the caller — whose appearance and location are revealed about halfway through the film and who’s played by Pat Healy — Mr. Zobel immersed himself in the reality show “Cops.” “I was trying to pick up on the way that cops talk, the way they alternately comfort and assume authority in a situation and also manipulate in certain ways,” he said. “If you watch any one episode of ‘Cops’ you’re like, ‘Wow, they talked that person into doing that crazy thing.’ ”

***

Mr. Zobel has noticed that a common criticism of the film is to write off the characters as implausibly gullible fools. “Everyone plays the part of the hero in their mind and says that they wouldn’t do it,” he said. “But clearly that statistically is not accurate.”

As played by Ms. Dowd, a stage veteran with a long résumé of character roles on screen, Sandra is not simply an idiot nor a clear-cut villain. “When I read it, I knew on a gut level that you could play it in a truthful way,” she said. “I don’t think people want to actually see that part of themselves, it’s too uncomfortable. But for actors, we’re not looking to avoid the feeling, we’re looking to own it.”

***

“Compliance” can certainly be read as an allegory on blind allegiance to authority and the diffusion of responsibility. But Mr. Zobel stressed that the film does not advance a thesis; nor does his cool, controlled approach preclude empathy for his characters. “It all has to be rooted in real people and things,” he said.

***

“It’s been disappointing when I hear that people have problems with the film but don’t want to challenge me,” he said. “It’s intentionally complicated. I’m happy for any sort of conversation.”

After I watched it, I was sort of thrilled -- it was such a good example of the sort of herd mentality that I find so distasteful in most people. Sheeple! A link to this film should be next to the dictionary definition of the word sheeple, because it basically encapsulated everything there is to know or think about what it means to be a sheeple. It reminded me of a comment I saw once on this blog. I wish I could remember it. I feel like I included it in the twitter. It said something like -- "you always say we deserve what we get? how do we deserve it? for trusting people? for expecting the best from people and not expecting to get taken by everyone we meet?"

Of course while I was watching, I was just as disturbed as everyone else, probably more disturbed because I understood all of the horrible implications sooner than they did. I knew what would happen and I knew that the audience members would decry this as being an isolated incident of preying upon idiots, but I knew better. I know how fragile the social status quo is and how desperate people are to maintain that status quo, particularly those that think they benefit the most from it. The middle class! 

They think that they are being unselfish. They are working hard while the poor people don't and the rich people don't and it's upon their shoulders that society is run. And it's also the middle class that will die (or kill) to defend the status quo. Martyrdom in the guise of patriotism or some other nonsense virtue. But they're not behaving unselfishly. Their behavior is motivated by fear and greed. People cling to the facade of predictability that the status quo provides them, distracting them from the possibility that life is meaningless or that they really aren't as good as they had hoped. This represents en masse what sociopaths are always targeting in individuals -- self deception and self justification. I don't mind them being martyrs. It's more this "kill" element that I'm worried about. The "let's all take up arms to defend this oppressive status quo for the good of humanity" mentality is what scares me. This is the fragility in the human mind and the social order that allows for mob mentality. 

But to answer the person, why do you deserve what you get? When you get taken by a sociopath? Or pranked? If you can't see it, I don't know if I can really explain it to you. But watch the movie and realize that the only people that the prank caller is able to control are the people who are invested in the status quo enough to be afraid what would happen if the status quo was disturbed. It is this fear that the prankster preyed on, and anyone who wasn't similarly invested in maintaining the status quo was magically immune.

By the way, my friend who saw the movie with me says he hates the word "sheeple." He says only stupid people use it. I guess the implication was that I am stupid for having used it. I don't like it that much either because I think it is often misused, like "nonplussed" or certain swear words. But if there was ever an application of that word, it applies to anyone who blindly struggles to maintain the status quo at all costs.    

No limits

I have a tendency to not know my limits, either from big things like going 10 days with my appendix ruptured before I finally passed out and was rushed to a hospital, to smaller things like having nicks and scars all over my hands from recklessly handling cooking knives. I eat rotten food and have no real sense that I should stop. I have driven too fast, pushed too hard, lied too much, and turned the screws on people so hard that they snapped. I don't know what it is, I am blind to certain boundaries, certain warning signs that I need to back off of whatever it is that I'm doing.

Another small, but illustrative example -- when I was a child, my parents used to monitor what I ate and in what portions. When I first started eating by myself, it took a while for me to understand not to eat until I vomited. I had no desire to overeat, I wasn't even eating sweets or anything particularly desirable. It was more like I either couldn't feel the sensations of being full, or that I was somehow able to override those sensations, to ignore them and keep eating then promptly wretch it all up into toilets, backyards, parks, parking lots, etc.

These past couple months I pushed myself very hard, particularly mentally. Now I feel a little broken. I can feel that I have hurt myself. I am mentally not all there. I don't feel bad, I just don't feel right. When I go to say something, it's like someone else is saying it, and not what I meant to say. There is a disconnect between me, my conscious self, and the me that is talking and acting like me in the world. I feel like I have a very mild form of alien hand syndrome, but affecting my entire body and mind. The inner me has to some extent vacated the premises, leaving the rest to survive on evolutionary autopilot.

This has happened at least once before for different reasons, and I recovered, but was never quite the same I don't think. I wonder what will happen this time. It's odd thinking that my mind and body can take so much punishment, that I can subjugate my will in so many ways, but that there is finally a breaking point where something will just snap -- an irreparable injury. When I was reading that article about Elon Musk, I found an interesting quote from him, an explanation of why his marriage failed: "I went from working hard to working ridiculously hard. And stress breaks things."

Creativity = immorality

File this under "how to become more like a sociopath," this Scientific American article discusses how being creative (and even thinking more creatively) makes you more likely to cross moral boundaries:

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
***
The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study. It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence. To explore this, the authors set up an experiment in which participants were induced into a creative mindset and then given the opportunity to cheat.  [It did.]
***
In addition, the researchers had guessed that creativity would lead to unethical behavior because it enabled people to more easily come up with justifications for their actions. Research has previously shown that whenever people do something which might be perceived as bad, they tend to reduce the ‘badness’ of this behavior by finding some justification for their corrupt behavior. As an example, if you find yourself being less than honest on your taxes, you may justify this by telling yourself that this is something everyone does, or that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.

The craziest part about this is the final experiment, that basically shows that one of the primary reasons why people don't cheat is that they can't come up with their own justifications for their behavior and that once you provide a readymade justification for them, they are much more likely to cheat:

So, if creativity leads to dishonesty primarily by assisting in coming up with justifications for dishonest behavior a creative mindset should not influence people’s likelihood of cheating if they already have some justification in mind. To test this idea, the researchers provided ‘justifications’ for some participants by allowing them to roll the die multiple times, but telling them that only the first roll counted. It turns out that one way of increasing the ease with which people can come up with justifications is by allowing them to observe something which almost happened, but didn’t. In this case, rolling a six on the second roll after rolling a lower number on the first, critical roll should give people a leg up on justifying their dishonest behavior.

It was found that when asked to roll the die once, people not primed with creativity were relatively honest. Individuals primed with creativity, on the other hand, behaved much more dishonestly, reporting much higher die rolls on average. Further, this effect disappeared when people rolled the die multiple times. That is, when people were provided with help to think up justifications, creativity had no effect on cheating. This pattern of results seems to confirm that creativity helps people to think up justifications for dishonest behavior.

These studies demonstrate that there is indeed a dark side to creativity. Perhaps, given this information, it should come as no surprise that the best and brightest in many fields are frequently caught in all manner of immoral transgressions.

Now empaths who want to acquire the skills of a sociopath have yet another avenue to pursue in cultivating an ability to be morally blind -- creativity.  According to the article, all sorts of activities can get you in that cheating frame of mind, even something as simple as arranging the words sky, is, why, blue, and the, into the sentence, “the sky is blue”.  This may also be why showbusiness is so cutthroat.

"What is it Like to Never Have Felt an Emotion?"

Asks the BBC in this article of the same name sent to me by a reader about alexithymia. It makes some interesting points. I'll highlight a few.

The causes:

Today, it seems clear that there may be many types of alexithymia. While some might have trouble expressing emotions, others (like Caleb) might not even be conscious of the feelings in the first place. Richard Lane, at the University of Arizona compares it to people who have gone blind after damage to the visual cortex; despite having healthy eyes, they can’t see the images. In the same way, a damaged neural circuit involved in emotional processing might prevent sadness, happiness or anger from bursting into consciousness. (Using the analogy of the Russian doll, their emotions are breaking down at the second shell of feeling – their bodies are reacting normally, but the sensations don’t merge to form an emotional thought or feeling.) “Maybe the emotion gets activated, you even have the bodily responses, but it happens without you being consciously aware of the emotion,” he says.

Along these lines, a few recent fMRI scanning studies have found signs of a more basic perceptual problem in some types of alexithymia. Goerlich-Dobre, for instance, found reduced grey matter in areas of the cingulate cortex serving self-awareness, potentially blocking a conscious representation of the emotions. And André Aleman at the University Medical Centre in Groningen, the Netherlands, detected some deficits in areas associated with attention when alexithymics look at emotionally charged-pictures; it was as if their brains just weren’t registering the feelings. “I think this fits quite well with [Lane’s] theory,” says Aleman – who had initially suspected other causes. “We have to admit they are right.”

Interestingly, this connection to other physical disorders:

Further work could also pin down the puzzling link to so-called “somatic disorders”, such as chronic pain and irritable bowel syndrome, that seem to be unusually common in people with alexithymia. Lane suggests it’s down to a kind of “short-circuit” in the brain, created by the emotional blindness. Normally, he says, the conscious perception of emotions can help damp down the physical sensations associated with the feeling. “If you can consciously process and allow the feeling to evolve – if you engage the frontal areas of the brain, you recruit mechanisms that have a top down, modulatory effect on bodily processes,” says Lane. Without the emotional outlet, however, the mind could get stuck on the physical feelings, potentially amplifying the responses. As Goerlich-Dobre puts it: “They are hypersensitive to bodily perceptions, and not able to focus on anything else, which might be one reason why they develop chronic pain.” (Some studies, have in fact found that alexes are often abnormally sensitive to bodily sensations, although other experiments have found conflicting evidence.)

My neurotherapist actually suggested that what I perceive to be food allergies (I basically eat the same 10 foods for 90% of my nutrition) might actually be emotional distress that I am not aware of but that is still registering physically in these negative ways. 

The way one of the sufferers connects with emotions is often an academic exercise:

Physical sensations certainly seem to dominate Caleb’s descriptions of difficult events, such as periods of separation from his family. “I don’t miss people, as far as I can tell. If I’m gone, and don’t see someone for a long period, it’s a case of out of sight, out of mind,” he says. “But I do feel physically a kind of pressure or stress when I’m not around my wife or my child for a couple of days.”
***Caleb, too, has visited a cognitive behavioural therapist to help with his social understanding, and through conscious effort he is now better able to analyse the physical feelings and to equate it with emotions that other people may feel. Although it remains a somewhat academic exercise, the process helps him to try to grasp his wife’s feelings and to see why she acts the way she does.

And finally the obligatory knock on sociopaths, because heaven forbid someone confuse your total lack of emotions and affective empathy with something as so way different as psychopathy:

Ultimately, he wants to emphasise that emotional blindness does not make one unkind, or selfish. “It may be hard to believe, but it is possible for someone to be cut off completely from the emotions and imagination that are such a big part of what makes us humans,” he says. “And that a person can be cut off from emotions without being heartless, or a psychopath.”

Legitimate form of life

I tweeted this article about how Oliver Sacks conceives as difference not as a disability, but as a different set of abilities, but I wanted to share some more thoughts on it.

Maria Popova writes:

A voracious lifelong reader, Dr. Sacks had grown enchanted by the H.G. Wells short story “The Country of the Blind,” set in an isolated society where blindness prevailed for three centuries and where a lost Western traveller finds himself the aberrant one, afflicted with sight. Drawing on the Wells story, his own childhood experience of visual migraines that temporarily blunted his color perception, and his neurological work with a painter who had suddenly become colorblind, Dr. Sacks bridged two of his great literary and intellectual heroes — Wells and Darwin — and wondered whether there might exist, not in fiction but in geography, a real isolated culture where total colorblindness — or achromatopsia — had become a basic condition among the population.

Because such mutations are most easily contained in cultures isolated by sea, he reasoned that if such a society existed, it would have to be on an island. After tracking down the appropriate colleague to ask, he was surprised and thrilled to learn that one such island did indeed exist — Pingelap in the Caroline archipelago of Micronesia, where total colorblindness had been coloring the genetic pool for two centuries.
***
Like all genetic deviations from the mean, colorblindness on Pingelap had emerged due to a formidable brush with randomness. In 1775, a typhoon decimated 90% of the people living on the island. Most of the remaining survivors eventually succumbed to a slow death of starvation, so that of the one thousand islanders only twenty remained. Several centuries earlier, the original settlers had brought to Pingelap the recessive gene for colorblindness, but because the population had been large enough, the odds of two carriers marrying and the gene manifesting in their children had been fairly low. Now, with a tiny but fertile group left with no recourse but inbreeding to repopulate the island, the recessive gene suddenly flourished into growing domination and total colorblindness was soon a common condition.



Oliver Sacks writes:

Colorblindness had existed on both Fuur and Pingelap for a century or more, and though both islands had been the subject of extensive genetic studies, there had been no human (so to speak, Wellsian) explorations of them, of what it might be like to be an achromatope in an achromatopic community — to be not only totally colorblind oneself, but to have, perhaps, colorblind parents and grandparents, neighbors and teachers, to be part of a culture where the entire concept of color might be missing, but where, instead, other forms of perception, of attention, might be amplified in compensation. I had a vision, only half fantastic, of an entire achromatopic culture with its own singular tastes, arts, cooking, and clothing — a culture where the sensorium, the imagination, took quite different forms from our own, and where “color” was so totally devoid of referents or meaning that there were no color names, no color metaphors, no language to express it; but (perhaps) a heightened language for the subtlest variations of texture and tone, all that the rest of us dismiss as “grey.”

Sacks brings a colleague, Knut Nordby, who happens to also be colorblind, and experiences the island very differently than Sacks:

For us, as color-normals, it was at first just a confusion of greens, whereas to Knut it was a polyphony of brightnesses, tonalities, shapes, and textures, easily identified and distinguished from each other.

The world wasn't just tailored made for the colorblind, the colorblind people also seemed to have a unique advantage over their counterparts:

The achromatopic children seemed to have developed very acute auditory and factual memories… [They] were oddly knowledgeable too about the colors of people’s clothing, and various objects around them — and often seemed to know what colors “went” with what… We could already observe in these achromatopic children in Mand how a sort of theoretical knowledge and know-how, a compensatory hypertrophy of curiosity and memory, were rapidly developing in reaction to their perceptual problems. They were learning to compensate cognitively for what they could not directly perceive or comprehend.

The best part of the video is at 2:55 where he tells the story of them asking how the colorblind could even tell when a banana was ripe, since they couldn't distinguish between green and yellow. They brought a green banana, and they sort of contemptuously thought -- this illustrates our point, they can't tell this banana is green. But the banana turned out to be ripe. They explained -- you're narrow minded, you would have said this banana wasn't ripe because you would only be focused on color, but they were focused on everything else about the banana -- texture, smell, etc. Similarly, a lot of people who rely on empathy have a hard time understanding how those without it could make the same sorts of judgments or choices for which the empaths rely on it so heavily. Not only can we make the same judgments and choices, we sometimes can get there more accurately without the empathy, because the emotions are not clouding our moral judgment.

The video continues, we do stigmatize people because people have characteristics that put them in conflict with others, but once the population has a large percentage of that type of person, they just seem normal. I think of the debate I got in with someone about which is more dangerous -- maleness, or sociopathy. In my mind there's an easy argument to make for maleness. If you took a female empath and made her a sociopath, she would be much less statistically likely to be a violent criminal than if you made her into a man. That's just the statistical difference between males and females in terms of propensity towards violence. But of course no one seriously advocates for the elimination of men from the human race. Since they are so prevalent, we think of their violent tendencies as being rather normal.

Sacks puts it this way:

There is a sort of critical level, so that if a tenth or a quarter of the population have some condition, it has to be accepted as a legitimate form of life and won’t be marginalized and, sometimes, won’t even be noticed.

Trans

Continuing the theme of fun parallels, this New York Times article about Chaz Bono and the transgendered:

The two men compared today’s cultural blind spot regarding transgender people to attitudes about homosexuality during World War II, when homosexuals in the armed forces were considered psychiatrically abnormal and were court-martialed and dishonorably discharged. Until 1999, gender identity disorder was also classified as a mental disorder. Though it is now considered a medical issue, the “disorder” stigma is difficult for any marginalized group to shake.

“The notion of trans is incomprehensible to most people,” Mr. Bailey said. “It is so foreign.”
***
History mostly demonstrates the violence of embracing either pole of moral certainty. The black and white of gender identification has always pushed an infinitude of differences into the margins.

The oddest quote to me is when Cher says, " “If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a man, I couldn’t get to the surgeon fast enough.” If I woke up in a different body of any gender, I don't think I would mind at all. I think it would be fun and exciting, particularly at first. I mean, the limitations of gender and body can be annoying, but if you have to have them at all, it might be fun to mix it up.

Conversation with a sociopath (?) (part 4)

D.R.: On loyalty...I remain loyal to a certain degree. At some point, betrayal can become too much for me to trust someone again. Trust does not come easily to me. Someone always has a motive; what it is and how pure are the questions I try to answer when putting "trust" into someone.

M.E.: Hmm, jaded.

D.R.: That being said, when I do decide to trust someone, I expect that they don't break it. It's a privilige, not a right. The more I trust someone, the more I'll invest into the relationship.

M.E.: A very utilitarian view of things.

D.R.: This may result into higher trust and higher investment, until I consider that person a part of my life.

M.E.: A part of your life, or a part of you?

D.R.: I would say more a part of me. Someone in whom I place or find a piece of my identity. For instance, my best friend and I have been friends for many years. At first, we were not very close. But as I saw more of myself in her, she became more important to me. This is how I've always viewed love, both sexual and platonic. The only difference is the fucking. I call it "giving myself to them." This bond goes as so: I decide I like you, I will take you for a test run. You drive nicely, a fast ride, rough at times, smooth at others, but I do the steering. I "buy" you with favors, flattery, and give you want you want in a relationship.

M.E.: You don't mind this because it appeals to your risk-seeking, unemotional nature? Socios (allegedly) have difficulties fully integrating their sex life in the rest of their life.

D.R.: I have a hard time seeing how sex is the end-all, be all in relationships other than the trump card. I find I hold out on it because I want to keep the person around. Other times I give in a bit so they don't think they are wasting their time. In return, you are there when I need you, you do not cheat on me, and you don't act like a doormat. Obviously my friends can have other friends, but when I have a sexual/"romantic" relationship with someone, I do not tolerate them doing the same with someone else.

M.E.: Obviously.

D.R.: All my life, I've always thought I'd be something special. As a kid, I was Lara Croft, saving the world from mystical objects and the evil people that would use them to destroy everything. Then I was a spy...I'd single-handedly take down a terrorist organization, or maybe a corrupt government. Always, it seemed my version of justice was "vigilante," because, of course, police officers are easily bought and sold. So are judges and juries. The whole damn system is corrupt...I wanted to save it. Salvage it. Maybe start a revolution. But I have no set career...just a desire to play the hero. My last boyfriend understood this; he wanted to be a spy too, lol.

M.E.: Again, I have posted about this. Delusions of grandeur are very common among sociopaths. We all think that we were destined for something great, and it's quite possible that we are.

D.R.: I think I would make a fantastic spy. But I think I would also have a problem with taking blind direction if I can't fit it into my own agenda, so maybe not... I'm very good in social settings, and people often think they are learning much about me, but it's all very vague. They just make conclusions I don't bother to correct. I don't lie much, not in a harmful way. Little white lies that don't hurt anyone and probably make everyone better off, yes...but I don't lie specifically to make someone feel bad. Usually I don't have to lie to make them feel bad. Conversely, I don't have to do much to make them want to help me, either. People readily do things for me, even small things. I can be sitting on my ass typing away on my computer and get one of my parents to walk my dog, even if they're in their pj's. My friend drives an hour to see me every week and then an hour back, but I don't ever drive down there unless I must. She's more than happy to do it (which is great, 'cause I hate filling up my gas tank).

M.E.: I sometimes wonder why people adore me so much, too. Particularly in my family, I am a huge crowd favorite. Maybe they appreciate an unusual viewpoint, or maybe they just want to make sure that I'll always be on their side.

D.R.: I am the star of my family. The first in my direct line to go to college, quickly promoted at work, always engaging. I seem like a real go-getter, especially compared to other low-performing relatives (whom I really believe are just acting that way because they see it gets them out of responsibilities).

D.R.: If you decide to post this on your blog (despite how lengthy it is), you are more than welcome to do so. If you must attach a name to it, you may use D.R. It is short for the name of a character in a story I wrote in high school (I loved writing; my stories had very dark or very ironic themes). She was a murderer and a thief, and the entire story was written in her point of view. I've never murdered and I've never stolen (well, not since I was too young to know what stealing is), but they all agreed she reminded them of me. So, you may call me that. :)

M.E.: Yeah, I may, I think people enjoy reading portraits of sociopathy.

D.R.: It’s the villain/antihero that everyone loves to hate.

Sociopaths = moral nihilists

Our friend Mr. Birdick on another site:

Let me give you a personal anecdote. Once upon a time, I was in the military. During one afternoon lunch period in boot camp, I remember having a small epiphany as I was standing in line waiting to reach the counter. I looked around and saw groups of my fellow inmates… I mean, recruits… sitting at their tables, following the rules handed down to us by our “superiors”. No talking, no horse play, eat quickly. I saw the recruits sneakily having whispered conversations, quietly disobeying those rules. I saw the officers in charge sitting at their table, talking loudly and raucously, enjoying themselves and seeming to revel in their “elevated” position in the hierarchy. I saw the differences in uniform. One group’s uniforms signifying their roles are superiors, the other group’s signifying their roles as inferiors, people who could and would be yelled at, disrespected and ordered about by the superiors. I saw that we all, officer and recruit alike, volunteered to put on these costumes and play these roles. And it hit me that it was all a joke. We were all playing a very elaborate game of make believe for adults. What’s more, I saw that this is how it is everywhere. It wasn’t just boot camp. It was Congress. It was corporate America. It was church. It was family. We are all playing these roles, and what’s more, I saw that we did not have to. It is our fear, among other, less potent motivations, that keeps us locked into the mass absurdity. We believe in rules that have no basis in any other space outside of the human brain. It’s like the rules of Monopoly, the board game. We agree to play by them, but once the game is done, we fold up the board, put the pieces and the cash away, and forget all about the rules that make the game possible. (Obviously I’m not original. This was long before I’d even heard of game theory.) But human society is one game that never, EVER ends. How would you feel if one morning you awoke, walked out of your home to face the day only to discover that everyone appears to be living and dying and killing by the rules of what you were raised to believe was only a board game? For me, the rules, the roles and the beliefs are all part of a game, one that is not real and is not important. But it appears that for most other people, the game is real. It’s all real to them and it all matters, including and especially who they believe themselves to be. Everything appears to hinge of their sense of identity (their roles). It’s so important in fact that they are willing to kill in the name of their rules and roles and make believe society. None of it has to cohere. It does not have to make sense even. It just has to be what they believe is true and right. It is the function of beliefs, not their veracity, that matters most.

That is my subjective experience of society around me. Again, I believe that most people are not being consciously disingenuous. To reiterate, I understand all too well that many people mean it from the depths of their being when they think, feel and believe certain things. All of the above is the very meaning of most people’s lives. But for me, these people I am referring to are like straw dogs, empty suits who confuse emotional depth with reality. They believe that what they think and what they feel is the be all to end all. They do not see the blind biology that makes their beliefs about themselves and their society possible. They most certainly refrain from any kind of sustained introspection. So naturally, they mistake their beliefs and feelings with fact and they surround themselves with others who will agree with them as a means of shoring up those beliefs, their yay-sayers. Why else would the average human ego be so fragile and so in need of constant validation if it were not comprised of mostly opinion, wish fulfillment and patterns of behavior acquired in childhood and repeated in what passes for adulthood? (In other words, hot air.) The smarter ones may see some of this in others but they can never see it in themselves because they believe that they and theirs, among all other groups, have somehow won the belief lottery: their beliefs are of course right and true and honorable! Their families, their religion, their country is what’s right and true and honorable. Their version of love is the real version, the right and true and honorable version. And what threatens a belief, a feeling, a sense of self in constant need of propping up? Other people, with their conflicting beliefs and feelings and senses of self of course, which explains the ubiquitous conflict of all types, found at all levels of society, from the nuclear family all the way up to the captains of industry and heads of state. In the name of love (of “soul mate”, family, country, god, capitalism, communism, etc) they have waged all kinds of war and invented the means with which to destroy every human being on this lovely but insignificant little planet of ours.

Then they have the nerve, the gall to label people who, for one reason or the other find themselves emotionally disconnected from all the above, as pathological. They say they are “chilled” when someone can kill without remorse, even as they support killing in the name of ~fill in the blank with a preposterous reason~. It is truly laughable. Why should I play by their rules when those rules are so often mind numbingly stupid and pointless? Why should I beat myself up or lose sleep at night because I fail to take what I see as one great big walloping delusion seriously?

The above may sound as if I am angry with society. That would be misleading. Right now, at this moment, the most I feel is slightly annoyed at the ludicrousness of it all and at the fact that I am forced to navigate through this miasma of BS just to survive. Otherwise, it is what it is. There is nothing to do but accept it, deal with it, and even from time to time, take advantage of it for my own gain.

Why we need psychopaths (part 4)

Last one, the distinction between morality and laws:

The psychological explanation that separates the group of respected professionals from the sadistic psychopaths lies in the existence of a conscience. The explanation of a conscience varies greatly but, in general, it is regarded as a built-in moral judgment that distinguishes right from wrong. When a person does something that violates their moral code, the conscience activates feelings of guilt and shame to alert them of this breach in ethics. Social norms require expressed remorse for the infraction, which often includes making restitution. Problems arise because morality is relative to individual societies, cultures and people. In other words, what is considered wrong by one individual may be encouraged and celebrated by another. To regulate the conduct of people in a society, written rules, with corresponding punishments, are put into place. The end result is that laws can be imposed but morality cannot. It stands to reason that if morality cannot be forcibly applied to a person, then the existence of a conscience should be irrelevant because “right” and “wrong” are subjective. As long as an individual respects the laws they are governed by, what difference does it make how one feels when they commit an offense? Furthermore, if they do feel bad is it because they harmed someone, or only because they got caught? The focus then is primarily on the emotional aspect while the behavior itself is secondary. This completely contradicts the way business, medical professionals and military troops operate in that their behaviors in the field are more important than the emotion behind it.

Although there is a distinction between morals and laws, the importance society places upon morality is best illustrated in a courtroom. When a criminal expresses remorse for their crime they are often given a lesser punishment. Conversely if a criminal shows pride in their deviance they face the harshest of consequences and are the subject of the judge’s contempt. Essentially, it is throwing the book (of laws) at their bad behavior (immorality). The punishment generally corresponds with the degree of decidedly bad behavior. Morality is measured in a court of law by the intention that spurs the action in question. A psychopath would be considered amoral, because they are unaware of, or indifferent toward, moral principles. Is a psychopath incompetent to stand trial because they cannot empathize with their victims? Ignorance of the law is no excuse but judging a person’s morality when they don’t have the ability to form it is akin to punishing a blind man for not having the ability to see. It comes back to the question of a conscience. Is it responsible for using emotions such as empathy and guilt to direct behavior or does one’s pattern of behavior indicate the existence of a conscience? Perhaps behavior operates independently of a conscience. Further, the absence of a conscience may not be as significant as it appears to be.

Not being guided by a ‘moral compass’ means that judgments of good vs. bad and rights vs. wrong are determined using a different mechanism. Psychopaths know the difference between right and wrong because they understand cause and effect. While such a simplistic method of decision-making leaves plenty of room for error, it also explains why they are sometimes unaware of the trouble they cause or outright do not care. If they choose to do what social norms and laws determine to be “good” and someone is unintentionally hurt in the process who assumes the burden of guilt? Their intention was good, indicating morality in that they chose to follow socially acceptable rules, but the behavior violated another person’s moral code and no remorse is being expressed on cue. It is in this space that the mask of sanity begins to slip and people are often shockingly aware that this person possesses very little real emotion. The psychopath, however, feels no guilt or empathy by default and can’t understand why the other person is so upset. There is no “guilty conscience” giving them a clue and they are displaying the symptom of being “indifferent to social norms” while most likely presenting as ‘cold-hearted.’ Why should a psychopath fake emotion just to appease the other person? His behavior is within the framework of the laws but his emotion is not fueling the behavior. They do not see a need for emotion to be involved so pervasively in life and regular people cannot fathom how it is possible to function without emotional connections to other people. Psychopaths seem to intellectually understand that losing a close friend brings about pain which leads to crying as a way to release overwhelming emotion in normal people. But to cry because your feelings were hurt is a foreign concept. Therefore, the psychopath sees no logical reason for either party to display emotion in this situation; rather, his good intentions and avoidance of malice are enough to justify his action. Just because it did not go according to plan does not make him responsible for the other person’s feelings. Furthermore, the slighted person doesn’t deserve an apology because it is they who are handicapped by irrational emotions.

It is here in this moral collide that the true function of psychopaths comes to light. Here we have Conflict Theory in that the powerful seek to impose constraints on their subordinates in order to retain control. The psychopath, seeing themselves as superior because they are not weakened by senseless emotions, seeks to impose laws that make logical sense. The non-psychopath, seeing themselves as more fully human because they possess a conscience, seeks to compel the psychopath with their admirable morality. Emile Durkheim’s (1893) theory on deviance comes to life as the parties war over what is “right” and “good.” The moral party will defend their principles and encourage other like-minded people to join together and build strength in numbers. The psychopath sees unrestrained emotion, which is confusing and frightening thereby perceiving a threat. The proceeding deregulation serves as Durkheim’s (1893) definition of anomie.

To label a person “bad” is a disservice to their inherent qualities that are necessary to sustain the delicate balance in which we exist. Psychopaths do not wish to possess the incomprehensible idea of a conscience but they are sorely aware something is missing. Normal people would not give up their ability to connect with others in a way only empathy can achieve, but in the midst of emotional or psychological trauma the temptation to trade morality for “an unburdened mind” is tremendous. As to which side came out the winner, the answer is decidedly both. They lost the battle but won the war. For that reason, psychopaths are a necessary component of society because they offer a unique perspective unlike that of normally functioning personalities.

Interview with a seducee (part 4)

(continued from here)

I didn't think too much about it when I got home. I remember thinking just one or two times thinking about the whole night in general and remember afterward telling people that I hadn't been talking to you anymore, but it was specifically, it was really when we were going to get those cables. You had driven and we were in the parking garage area and we had to get into an elevator to get into the store, which I found odd. All of the sudden there was a lightness and a comfort between us, and maybe it was a newfound comfort in someone that you've kissed or shared enough conversation or time in one day that we're able to coexist in the same store or the same location with a lightness as opposed to all of the awkwardness of times past, that was very refreshing and exciting.

We were talking about this person you were dating long distance and also this other person who you told me about with whom you felt there was something going on there, something less than a relationship so far but that person was going to go to see you play and was either more interested in you than you wanted, but essentially you were sharing with me the parameters of having to balance three people at the same time and that that was a little bit more, perhaps, than you had anticipated at the time. I remember distinctly feeling at the time that I was no better or worse than them and certainly wasn't competitive with them. I either stand on my own or I don't. I wasn't taken aback in any way by the idea that you were either dating other people or you weren't, it was more the fact of the matter. But I remember, just by the way you were characterizing those people, thinking about how I would be characterized and thought of myself in terms of an explanation to someone else through your words and cautioned myself when I noticed even just standing in the elevator that I wanted to be physical with you, to touch you, kiss you, push you against the wall and kiss you, and show that physical sexual aggressiveness because of an intensity I was feeling. I knew that had to be controlled because whatever feelings I was having had to be tempered by the fact that it didn't appear that there was anything sustainable about whatever this was.

[regarding different sides of m.e.] I wouldn't say you seem like you have been different persons, I realize I have said that a lot in this narrative, but for me it's more those first impressions that you take from someone -- all those assessments that we make about people based in that blink and we roll from there and they either end up proving or disproving initial theories. I don't feel like you morphed into some different person or character so much that I had made different assumptions about you, and that's not even to say that your actions in one particular instance proved or disproved those assumptions, it just felt as if it was an out of character experience based on those assumptions. I don't know if the narrative sounded negative, I hope it didn't. I tried to be honest about what I felt in the situation, but I wouldn't be talking to you tonight if I thought that you had been disingenuous with me and showed all these different characteristics that had you as angry, liar, etc. If I thought those were actual aspects of your personality, I don't think I would still be in contact with you.

My biggest frustration with you is openness, transparency. I wish you would be more open with me, even if it was blunt or harsh. I guess because you don't tell me everything I assume there are lots of bad things that you aren't telling me; I feel like you are holding things back, calculating. You're just more reserved about things, I guess. That's probably smart, to approach things that way, be more protective of yourself. And I'm the opposite, this verbal diarrhea thing. At first, I probably should have never been as open to you, but by now I'm convinced that we've shared enough experiences, whether you can add them up on one hand or not, that I do have an idea of who you are. I don't have a problem sharing myself with you. I can't ask that you return that, but I feel that particularly where it feels the most confusing is that there was such an awkwardness about that email and us being together, there were these awkward moments for me and I guess I think that nothing is ever entirely clear but I just wish that this was a little more clear. Can't that just be the case? I just remember you saying things like "I thought about what it would be like to date you," and what goes through my mind when I hear that is that you've thought about the possibly of (1) dating and being with someone like me and (2) whether that would be a secret relationship, because I think of you as a plotting and calculating person, because you wouldn't go through any decision making process blind, so I was trying to think about what you would even think about to make that sort of statement to me.

You know, I still wonder why. Why the manipulation?

"Emotion is weakness"

From a reader:

I recently went looking through my old schoolwork from ages passed and was somewhat surprised to find that the sociopathic vein in my writing was clearly expressed as early as sixth grade where I, in a possibly narcissistic move, took the time to keep a book filled with my quotes. One of the first quotes simply stated "Emotion is weakness." This was around the same time that I started receiving court-mandated therapy to cover any possible psychological side effects of my parent's divorce. Those therapy sessions were where I first realized that I was different. I saw these sessions from the viewpoint of a bystander, and marveled at how stupid my therapist was. I made sure to get on her good side, covering up my extremely introverted personality by bringing comic books (Calvin and Hobbes) and using the topics of different strips to control the flow of our discussion. In later meetings, I managed to use up most of the time by getting the therapist to talk about herself. Later, I eavesdropped on her reporting to my mother that I was charming, outgoing, and generally well adjusted. It was then that I decided that I never wanted to be normal, to be as blind and stupid as this woman. My mother became friends with her and I had to visit often. It was annoying until she died of cancer, a few years later.

I bought my first copy of The Art of War in seventh grade, Machiavelli's The Prince in ninth. By eleventh grade, I had a fully formed self-concept, complete with a self-diagnosis of ASPD, and took home the school library's copy of Mein Kampf, only to be disappointed by the obscuring emotion that riddled the work. Most of my time since sixth grade has been spent furthering my self-concept, and honing my skills. The Myers Briggs personality inventory classified me as a strong INTJ (The mastermind) with 20 out of 20 points in introversion. I had two close friends at the time, and both of them were also INTJ's (which only appear in 1% of the population), as well as being in the highest intellectual tier. I don't form complete social networks; I merely connect with the 'elite' and the 'delinquents' (My esoteric personality is largely ignored by the vast majority) who think as I do. From them, I had complete access to whatever I wanted.

However, problems arose at home, where my addictive personality resulted in major cracks in my mask, leading to a rift between my father and I; and causing a complete lack of trust between us. It was a major obstacle in my maneuverings until I left home. My method of theft from him had to be complicated multiple times until it became easier to simply get money in other ways.

During the last few years of high school, my relationship was so grating that I constantly had to seek catharsis, which led to increasingly risky activities. Fortunately, I still had enough peace of mind to think before acting and to plan out these releases, although the family dog almost died (luckily, the only bruises were on her neck, which could be explained away) and I was almost caught breaking into a nearby university at three in the morning (The night Janitor was there early, which I later learned was due to an event scheduled later that day).

During philosophical conversations with my inner circle, I was forced to defend my actions (as part of the argument, no one was offended, they’d done worse) so I stated my worldview something like this: I don’t care if there’s a god or an afterlife because either way, I won’t know until I’m dead. I believe that nothing exists for a purpose, and the only meaning in this world is the meaning we create for ourselves. My ultimate goal in life is something to give meaning, something almost impossible to achieve (I chose world domination because I could play it off as a joke if anyone asked). Long-term hedonism is good, but the will to power saves one the time of making reasons, because it is a reason in and of itself. Live life with one principle, to regret nothing.

Those are all the answers I need.

-Potens

Overconfidence

Confidence is an amazing thing. Because appearances are essentially all that matter, especially in circumstances of information asymmetry, confidence is an incredibly important for any leader or successful individual. The hazard of confidence, as this New York Times article by famed behavioral psychologist/economist, are when the individual starts believing his own inflated stories. Here were the more poigant parts:
The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true.

When a compelling impression of a particular event clashes with general knowledge, the impression commonly prevails. And this goes for you, too. The confidence you will experience in your future judgments will not be diminished by what you just read, even if you believe every word.

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes. Anesthesiologists have a better chance to develop intuitions than radiologists do. Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously. In general, however, you should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this advice is difficult to follow: overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.

I've mentioned several times that I believe one of the primary practical differences between a narcissist and a sociopath is that a sociopath does not believe his own lies. Sociopaths are able to lie to others and also lie to themselves, but some compartmentalized version of them will always hold on to the truth, lest they make some of these mistakes of overconfidence or underestimation that are so apparent in our brother narcissists. I fully agree with the article, though, that the only real way to avoid the perils of overconfidence is to have some touchstone that allows you to verify the validity of a particular belief. For me, I like to have people around me whose opinions I trust. If they tell me something is or not so, I have to basically take them on their word, like playing a game of mental blind man's bluff where I'm being guided by one or more participants. Luckily I learned how to trust people in my early 20's, otherwise I don't know what I would do.