Friday, November 6, 2009

My story, for whatever it's worth (part 3)

So there you have it. Because I know who and what I am, I now know what I want: power, which equals freedom. Pursuing power/freedom would also provide the opportunity to play the game and a challenge. And it starts within. I see how important it is to focus on self development, to take command of myself. And to command myself, I must inevitably command my circumstances. None of this necessarily involves getting to the top of any ladder unless I decide that’s the game I wish to play. None of this need involve anything huge or historical unless I want it to. And it certainly doesn’t need to involve society’s definition of success unless it helps me achieve my objective. I want to experience the inner essence of these goals in the present and I am free to do just that. There’s also a whole world of tastes and locales and literature that I have yet to sample. I don’t have to do the so called ‘big things’. Self development, meeting and exceeding self chosen challenges and enjoying what life has to offer on its own terms really can be enough for now. I’m excited about my future, for the first time in a long time. That’s thanks, in part, to your insightful blog and the email exchanges. Even now, I don’t know if every professional would agree that I am a sociopath. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter. The label isn’t relevant; the underlying characteristics are. My detachment from emotion, including and especially moral ones, my lack of conscience, my flexible personality, my ability to manipulate at will and the profound impact these traits have on how I experience life, all of this I now understand in a way that is both illuminating and coherent, and I have your blog to thank for that.

I’m going to go play now, so to speak. Don’t worry. I won’t hurt anyone unless I’m crossed or unless I have to, so you haven’t unleashed a monster. You’ve liberated a wolf.

Thanks again!

Thursday, November 5, 2009

My story, for whatever it's worth (part 2)

A reader writes (cont.):
I make it sound easy or even simple. But it wasn’t. It was hard. It was confusing. It was painful. It was hard seeing everyone live a life that at least on the surface, made sense to them. It was painful seeing over and over again that I would never be part of their world without pretending. The fact that I knew I was pretending while they were being sincere made the alienation worse. I went through a time of hating them. I hated everything they stood for, everything they said they believed in. I also went through a time where I seriously indulged my delusions of grandeur. I figured since I could never truly be ordinary in the sense that other people were, I’d be extraordinary. I made so many mistakes during this time, so many errors and lapses in judgment. All because I didn’t know what I was. At last, I’ve figured it out.

While I was on my quest to understand what evolution made me for, to use a figure of speech, I set up a comfortable but boring life for myself. Steady work, a small studio apartment, isolation from family and friends and lots of reading, thinking, and me time was and is my life. I’m ready to change all that. Now that I understand what I am, I want to ‘play the game’. It’s time I used my instinctive psychological insight to my advantage rather than to just maintain the status quo the way I have been. I also want challenge. I want to push myself mentally and physically in ways that I never have before.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

My story, for whatever it's worth (part 1)

A reader writes:
I wanted to thank you for the blog. It’s been very helpful. I understand what I want now. It’s what I call the inner essence of the goal that I want, the thoughts and feelings I want to experience. I want power because I want to experience more freedom in my life. I have existential freedom of course. We all do. But I have not made good use of it. What I didn’t get before was that if I cannot make use of the power I could potentially have in the here and now, then getting to the top of any kind of organization will be for nothing. You know the old saying: wherever I go there I am. I haven’t taken advantage of the opportunities all around me because I’ve been too busy figuring myself out. My life up to this point has really been designed to keep myself afloat with minimal drama and effort while I focused on unraveling the mystery of why I was so ‘different’.

My story starts like so many of the other stories that you’ve featured in your blog and in the comments. I was a typical outsider. I knew I was different from my peers and even my family. I just never understood exactly what that difference was. I was never a shy kid. I was mostly indifferent, especially after I proved to myself that popularity could be had with just the right facial expressions, words and a few well placed actions. The social scene at school stopped being mysterious and became merely boring. And yeah, I pulled a series of stunts that would have gotten me a nice stay in prison if I’d been caught. I got over all of that in my early 20’s when it dawned on me that I was empty and that I had nothing I needed to do or had to do. I was without purpose or meaning. Yeah, sex is fun, no question, but orgasms only last so long. And I still didn’t get why I was so different? Not only did I not get that I would never be one of them, I didn’t even know why. So I went searching for answers. It took a long while. There were loads of false starts, dead ends and misunderstandings along the way. Finally, I was able to discard some false beliefs, start fresh and reexamine things. When I did, I was finally able to see where the differences were. I was able to put a name to the face. Those differences eventually lead me to study concepts like sociopathy and psychopathy. I read a lot of the popular work and some interesting articles on the internet. My Googling lead me to your blog and the comments. It was your unique take on all of this as well as some of the smarter commenters that lead me to see that I’d finally figured it out.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Insights into empath minds

I just don't understand them sometimes. I do things for (mainly) logical reasons, with a core emphasis in efficiency. As a libertarian, I'm always interested in the suppression of markets for moral reasons, so I found myself reading an article on the altruistic kidney donations of strangers and how (wait for it) the empath hordes shun them, considering them "freakish, inhuman, even repellent."
Most people find it uncomplicatedly admirable when a person risks his life to save a stranger from fire, or from drowning. What, then, is it about saving a stranger by giving a kidney, a far lesser risk, that people find so odd? Do they feel there is something aggressive about the act, as though the donor were implicitly rebuking them for not doing it, too? (There is no rebuke in saving a stranger from drowning -- you weren't there, you couldn't have done it. And you can always imagine that you would have if you had been.) Or perhaps it's that organ donation, unlike rescue, is conceived in cold blood, and cold-blooded altruism seems nearly as sinister as cold-blooded malevolence. Perhaps only the hot-blooded, unthinking sort can now escape altruism's tainted reputation, captured in the suspicious terms for what people are really engaging in when they think they're helping (sublimation, colonialism, group selection, potlatch, socialism, co-dependency -- the list goes on).
And this quote from one of the fascists supporting the UNOS (United Network for Organ Sharing) kidney breadline at the expense of donors taking the private option of self-selecting donor recipients:
Douglas Hanto, the chief of transplantation at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, for instance, feels that the system should work the same way for everybody--that there should be just one line to stand in. He concedes that it's possible that MatchingDonors draws in people who wouldn't otherwise donate--people who need the tug of a human story to sway them--thus making everybody better off, but, as long as its dating-service model favors the photogenic, the eloquent, and the computerized, he is against it. "We are all going to die," he says. "We have to do everything we can for our patients, but within the boundaries of moral principles. As much as we want to save everybody, we just can't."
I think the label "altruistic" is misplaced. I don't think the people donating need the tug of a personal story. From what I read, most of the donors think that it is inefficient to not donate a kidney that they're not using to someone who needs one to live. For instance, this description of a young donor:
The petty selfishness of daily life drove her crazy and she wanted to fix it. She hated the way that, in the checkout line at Target, a person with a whole cartful of stuff would not let a person with only one or two things go ahead of him. She hated that, when she was driving and let a pedestrian cross the road, the driver behind her would honk in frustration. She always tried to do nice things for others. At work, she would often buy coffee for her co-workers without being asked, though mostly this just bewildered people.
I know how she feels, but as much as I'd like to say that empaths live in a horrible world of their own making, I think it's just that they think so differently. Maybe their world doesn't seem so ugly to them.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Sociopaths on Wall Street

From a New Yorker article about the collapse of Bear Stearns:
[Former Bear Stearns C.E.O. Jimmy] Cayne understood selling; he started out as a photocopier salesman, working the nine-hundred-mile stretch between Boise and Salt Lake City, and ended up among the highest-paid executives in banking. He was known as one of the savviest men on the Street, a master tactician, a brilliant gamesman. “Jimmy had it all,” Bill Bamber, a former Bear senior managing director, writes in “Bear Trap: The Fall of Bear Stearns and the Panic of 2008” (a book co-written by Andrew Spencer). “The ability to read an opponent. The ability to objectively analyze his own strengths and weaknesses. . . . He knew how to exploit others’ weaknesses—and their strengths, for that matter—as a way to further his own gain. He knew when to take his losses and live to fight another day.”
Although the most successful Wall Streeters are probably narcissists:
This is what social scientists mean when they say that human overconfidence can be an adaptive trait. “In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,” Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes. “Selection therefore favors this form of overconfidence.” Winners know how to bluff. And who bluffs the best? The person who, instead of pretending to be stronger than he is, actually believes himself to be stronger than he is. According to Wrangham, self-deception reduces the chances of “behavioral leakage”; that is, of “inadvertently revealing the truth through an inappropriate behavior.” This much is in keeping with what some psychologists have been telling us for years—that it can be useful to be especially optimistic about how attractive our spouse is, or how marketable our new idea is. In the words of the social psychologist Roy Baumeister, humans have an “optimal margin of illusion.”
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