Sunday, October 9, 2011

Non-reactionary

I found this Men's Journal feature on Robert Downey Jr. to actually be interesting and relevant to anyone who struggles with fighting their own internal demons while actively waging war on external ones. In discussing his martial arts training and how it has influenced his life philosophy:
  • "You want to feed the good dog, because the shadow side of any of us is going to pop up at some point.”
  • “Wing Chun is all about guarding your center line,” Downey tells me, talking about the place where touchy-ouchy martial art meets philosophy of life. “Don’t fight force with force; use two hands at the same time; concentrate on your own thing; and after you have that dialed in, effect the balance, look for openings, look for arms to be crossed.
It's interesting to think about that, not fighting force--focusing on doing your own thing and just waiting for the right opportunity. People tend to be surprised with the minimalist, non-reactionary way in which I frequently respond when they're trying to pick a fight with me. I learned to do it first out of necessity because I would often be in altercations where the odds were stacked against me and it was no use fighting force with force. I've since grown to really love it as a tactic even in situations in which I have the upper hand. Now I use it as my default approach, as long as I'm able to hesitate long enough in my initial impulse to immediately lash out in retaliation. I guess that's maturation.

In any case, it's an infinitely better result than reacting like this guy:

Saturday, October 8, 2011

Sociopath quote: force and cunning

"The only means to gain one's ends with people are force and cunning. Love also, they say, but that is to wait for sunshine, and life needs every moment."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Benign neglect: Rizzoli and Isles

In response to the Fringe and Breaking Bad post, a reader mentioned the character Dr. Maura Isles from the television show "Rizzoli and Isles" as someone to watch out for. In the episode "I'm Your Boogie Man," the (Asperger's? Autism? Sociopath?) sometimes odd acting Isles questions a serial killer's statement that she is not afraid of him because she is just like him:


Rizzoli: You okay? Come on, Maura, talk to me. He's a freak. He gets to everybody.
Isles: I didn't -- I did a lot of research into his background; his childhood. Maybe he's not wrong.
Rizzoli: What are you talking about?
Isles: Maybe I am a little bit like him.
Rizzoli: You are nothing like him.
Isles: I don't -- I don't know, Jane. I was a weird kid.
Rizzoli: Were you killing small animals?
Isles: [laughs] No, but I dissected a lot of frogs.
Rizzoli: That's different.
Isles: I just started to think about things that I never really thought about before.
Rizzoli: Here it comes. There are bodies buried in your basement.
Isles: I spent a lot of time alone. I was adopted, my father was a professor and my mother she -- she came from a wealthy family and was an only child. I just realized something when I was reading about Hoyt. It just never occurred to be before. There was a lot of benign neglect. It's not that they didn't love me. It's just that I didn't ask for much. I don't think I really knew how, and the less that I would ask for the less time that they have for me. They were just very, very involved in their own lives and into each other. They sent me to boarding school when I was ten. I actually think that I sent away for the brochure myself. [smiles with Jane] They were delighted. I was really lost.
Rizzoli: Come here. [takes Maura's hand] No matter what happened to you, you are nothing like that monster, okay? You're a little anti-social maybe, goofy, but that's not the same thing.
Isles: [crying] Thank you.

This was interesting, this idea of benign neglect. I think it's easy to write a character like this off as being a relatively harmless Aspie, but do negative environmental factors like this trigger autism or Asperger's? Even if she is Aspie, or even just an introvert, apparently the way she was raised has led her to become an antisocial, relatively unfeeling and unempathetic brand of humanity, which really isn't that different from her foil the serial killer.

Can benign neglect trigger sociopathic behaviors? Maybe. Or probably.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Faith

Religious people sometimes get on this site and tell us that we're all going to burn in hell. I don't know what religion these people belong to, but I imagine that they have some pretty common judeo christian beliefs that God created man. Even if you accept the belief that God does not actually create evil, he certainly creates the ingredients, possibly even sets the ball in motion. At least I think that is a relatively common belief among those religiously inclined in those ways. You may say that God doesn't want man to lie down with man as he would woman, but you can't deny that God seems to have made certain people especially prone to wanting to do just that. Similarly, the sociopath. Born different, although not necessarily to murder indiscriminately. To those religious people, were the sociopaths born to live a wretched life and burn in hell?

It's odd because I think some sociopaths are actually more inclined to religion than the general population. We're so used to taking things on "faith," e.g. the legitimacy of other people's personhood, the existence of an emotional palette different than our own, etc. It's sort of like the colorblind people who have to take our word for it that orange exists the way it does (or does it? who is to say that our perception of that particular segment of the electromagnetic spectrum is any more or less correct than theirs?). These things I take on faith not really as truths but as things that seem plausible enough that I cannot deny their existence (I cannot reject the null hypothesis for you statisticians out there). Because I am so used to accepting the existence of things that I can neither feel nor see myself, it's not at all a jump for me to indulge in religious beliefs. And I do indulge -- maybe because they are a form of hedging my bets, maybe because I was raised to be religious and many of my familiar and other relationship ties are based on religion, or maybe because these beliefs actually do help fill the void of meaning that I otherwise would feel in my life.

But accepting the possibility of a God as I do, why do I not agree with my religious brothers that I am destined to go to hell. How do I reconcile any religious beliefs with who I am? Honestly, although part of me feels dark, a big part of me thinks that I am more Godlike than most people, particularly the God of Abraham and Moses. It's easy for me to think that I was a ruler before this life and will be in the life to come, which is I guess the real reason that these religious types get on here saying I'm going to hell, because I'm pretty sure that's blasphemy in their eyes.

Rex tremendae majestatis,
qui salvandos savas gratis,
salve me, fons pietatis.

King of tremendous majesty,
who freely saves those worthy ones,
save me, source of mercy.

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