Monday, June 20, 2011

The perverse inner world of babies

I find babies to be charming, but I also don't ascribe to them the innocence that most do, in fact this is probably why I like them so much. For being such little things, they can be so damn clever. Some of their more perverse behaviors are a good rejoinder to those who scream that psychopaths are murderous, manipulative, evil devil's span when it turns out, if those are your criteria for devil's span, we all are. Cracked.com, "6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of" includes lying, prejudice, defiance, getting high, stealing, and my favorite -- murder:
For a long time scientists had a theory that left handed people might have started out as twins in the womb. Their rationale was that in a set of twins one tends to be right handed and one left handed. Genetic and nurturing factors can also affect handedness, but they can't explain it completely in many cases. Maybe all lefties were the result of only one twin surviving the cage fight that is fetal development.

It wasn't until ultrasounds, and fearless cameras capable of surviving the uterus, that scientists discovered their hunch was right. Sort of. They were right in the fact that most lefties were once twins but they didn't go far enough. Scientists now think that a ridiculous one in eight people started out as two peas in a pod. Of course, only about one in 70 people actually is a twin. So what happened to your twin? You killed it and then absorbed it into your body. Yeah, those stories of adults finding teeth in their shoulder? Not urban legends.

Why Did I Do That?!
Because you're evil.

Not really. Chances are you were just the healthier fetus. Or you hogged all the blood if you shared a placenta. Or you grew faster and literally left your sibling no womb at the inn. If multiple pregnancies are really as common as they now seem, we evolved to be this way for a reason. Trying out two fetuses to see which one is more likely to survive is a pretty good plan evolutionarily. Unfortunately, carrying twins is very dangerous for the mother, meaning that our best bet as a species was to let one twin kill off the other early on in development. Just another reason lefties are a sinister, sinister group of people.
I trained my one-year-old relative how to carry a knife in her teeth commando style. It was hilarious. That babies must be trained to stop doing certain bad things, socialized to do "good" is not surprising. Of course they have a limited capacity to be good, at least a limited capacity to fight against what they have been evolutionarily programmed to do. This should not surprise us, as adults have similar difficulties in eschewing "evil" acts, but again for good evolutionary reasons. Does this suggest that we should reconsider how we define evil to exclude all evolutionary inclinations? And if so, how would the psychopathy fit in that equation? I guess the terms "humanize" and "demonize" are not the polar opposites that had been previously supposed.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

My Human Toys

This is a very entertaining blog about seduction (presented as an account of an actual seduction occurring in real time, but even if it is fiction it is still entertaining and filled with seduction truisms). The first post:
Most people like to think that they are strong-willed. They will often describe themselves as "someone who knows their own mind" or "not one to be pushed around." It's an ironic description. People rarely know their own minds. Most are followers not leaders. They are weak-willed and full of exploitable frailties. They are there for the taking by those of us who know our own minds and get to know theirs.

There are a number of ways of getting people to do what one wants. Violence and blackmail can be effective and both have their place in a puppet-master's tool-kit. But it is much more effective and sustainable to get inside the mind of the subjects. One starts by tapping into explicit needs and desires. Then one moves on to the dark corners of the mind. Those needs and desires that the subject knows but dare not admit. The final step is to create new needs and desires, through careful and patient conditioning. What could be more rewarding than changing a person's perception of what is "normal."

Friday, June 17, 2011

Song: Mack the Knife

Apparently murder ballads were once all the rage. One of my friends memorized the English translations of the original German lyrics to "Die Moritat von Mackie Messer" and recites them from time to time out of the blue -- "And the shark he has teeth and he wears them in his face and MacHeath he has a knife but the knife you don't see." It's both a charming and creepy habit.

An "illustrated" version:



And the shark, he has teeth
And he wears them in his face
And MacHeath, he has a knife
But the knife you don't see

On a beautiful blue Sunday
Lies a dead man on the Strand*
And a man goes around the corner
Whom they call Mack the Knife

And Schmul Meier is missing
And many a rich man
And his money has Mack the Knife,
On whom they can't pin anything.

Jenny Towler was found
With a knife in her chest
And on the wharf walks Mack the Knife,
Who knows nothing about all this.

And the minor-aged widow,
Whose name everyone knows,
Woke up and was violated
Mack, what was your price?

And some are in the darkness
And the others in the light
But you only see those in the light
Those in the darkness you don't see

But you only see those in the light
Those in the darkness you don't see

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Tactics of manipulation

A reader sent me this video:



With this comment:
It is sad how some people do not understand us, but will try to anyways. He acts as if it is us (normal society) versus them (manipulators). He is also a hypocrite, everyone manipulates people. I found this video quite ridiculous. I think all of society manipulates, but sociopaths are probably especially good at it (or at least would like to be, and we also are aware of our ability).

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Socio vs. Socio

A reader asked me what I thought of a particular sociopath versus sociopath match-up. I responded:
Socio vs. socio would be very interesting to watch. Do you know that I am a little afraid of going up against a fellow socio? Part of it is I am just so used to dealing with empaths that I feel like my skills are not well honed for socio combat. I'm sure I could improvise in the moment and that perhaps that would make the dance even more thrilling, but I am not at all sure that I would prevail -- probably 50/50 in my mind, which are not the odds I'm used to taking.
The other scary part is knowing deep down that I would stop at nothing to win. This makes me nervous in the same way that rage makes me nervous -- there is a loss of control and I would be worried about fallout.
I'm sure there's nothing to be worried about. I've gone up against a few socios before, been played for a fool, and actually learned quite a bit for my troubles, so I think that if I survived I would have gained something from the experience. Also sociopaths would probably be reluctant to engage in an all out war unless the stakes were high enough, and with so many other easier pickings to choose from I doubt that it would statistically ever come to that.
My previous altercations with sociopaths all ended in a détente after it became apparent that continuing to fight would harm much more than help either one of us. But I do sometimes worry about being in that sort of cold war situation and having something go wrong, or going up against a sociopath with a trigger finger or a bit of a death wish.
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