From a Pepsi commercial (via a reader):
Friday, December 16, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Gene expression
I think there are many other factors that would affect the way someone with sociopathic genes/tendencies might behave or manifest themselves. I sometimes like to use the example of someone with Down Syndrome. I actually have relatives that have Down Syndrome -- one blood and the other adopted. It's interesting to see the blood relative. He does sort of look like the rest of his family, his siblings and his parents, but he also looks unmistakably like his adoptive sister who also has Down Syndrome. In fact, most people would probably say he looks more like his adoptive sister than his blood siblings -- unless the observer was intentionally trying to look past some of the more obvious Down's markers such as distinctive facial features, body shape, etc.
Down's is an interesting condition. Throw an extra chromosome in there, and it affects the way seemingly every other chromosome is expressed. It's almost as if you take the raw genetic material and put a very distinctive mask over it, a sort of interpretive gloss that takes what was lying beneath and distorts it -- minimizing or maximizing or otherwise twisting it to something else, like when the face of a plastic doll melts.
I sort of think that sociopathy is like this. My personality resembles my siblings' quite a bit. It also resembles those of other sociopaths a good deal and in ways that are in some ways more poignant because of the relative rarity in the general populace. It's amazing to me how much I can share in common with strangers -- with people who are of different genders, ethnicities, races, nationalities, ages, etc. But I am not just like every other sociopath. From what I have seen of us we are all very different. But there is no mistaking a certain family resemblance.
Down's is an interesting condition. Throw an extra chromosome in there, and it affects the way seemingly every other chromosome is expressed. It's almost as if you take the raw genetic material and put a very distinctive mask over it, a sort of interpretive gloss that takes what was lying beneath and distorts it -- minimizing or maximizing or otherwise twisting it to something else, like when the face of a plastic doll melts.
I sort of think that sociopathy is like this. My personality resembles my siblings' quite a bit. It also resembles those of other sociopaths a good deal and in ways that are in some ways more poignant because of the relative rarity in the general populace. It's amazing to me how much I can share in common with strangers -- with people who are of different genders, ethnicities, races, nationalities, ages, etc. But I am not just like every other sociopath. From what I have seen of us we are all very different. But there is no mistaking a certain family resemblance.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
A sociopathic story (part 2)
(cont.)
M.E.: I don't really fight the boredom, I just go from one thing to the next. My attention span has historically been 3-5 years. By the second or third year of anything I am always looking for my next move. Luckily I have managed to stay in a relatively related field, although vastly different types of jobs within that field. My problem isn't even so much boredom, as an inability to make myself do anything that I don't want to do. It's a good thing that I am motivated in part by prestige and money, which I naturally equate with power.I am becoming better at my game. Two years ago, I went on a trip with a group of 6 people for four months. Two of the people there were married, and the woman was particularly easy to read. She had so many weak points that I simply couldn't help myself. I seduced her because I could, and I wanted to, and because it made me feel powerful. Her husband made it easy by verbally harassing her, or at least saying things that could very easily be reconstructed in her memory to seem that way.Currently I completely possess the mind of another woman, but that happened nearly by accident. I would not have chosen her as a target because she is too wrapped up in the social web at the university that I go to, and now I can't get rid of her even though she bores me. I can't figure out how to break the relationship without having to rebuild an entire network of people at this school. I'm sure that I can figure out a way to do this, but I've never really had to. Change of location has always been my go to method for cutting off contact, but I can't leave here for another 2 years.I suppose my greatest question is how do you prevent yourself from becoming bored? I need to explain that better. I'm never actually bored as I always have my mind and other people's minds to play with. What I mean is: how do you continue to do one job, or make it through a degree, or generally have any commitment that lasts longer than a year? Or is that just impossible for you?To be clear, I make no claims to the title of sociopath, as I think that is probably quite meaningless in its current state, but there are certain qualities which I share with sociopaths, enough for me to find the concept fascinating. I think I share all of the qualities on the checklist except trouble with the law and violence towards animals (I never understood the draw, my feeling on this is very neutral. I see no reason to either hurt or not hurt animals)In any case, I will continue to read your blog whether I hear from you or not. Just thought that I would introduce myself.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
A sociopathic story (part 1)
From a reader who identifies with sociopathy:
I was home schooled in a very religious household (my father was a senior pastor at a church in our town), and was never the centre of attention in any group of friends, and even after I eventually went to a public high school, I always preferred to remain on the outside. People in general never really interested me in a long term way, and my ability to maintain friendships has always been held back by the fact that as soon as someone is no longer nearby, I find it much easier to move on to a new friend than to try to maintain any form of long distance communication. There really is no reward in that for me. I suppose that all of that is to say that I never really thought much about the differences that I noticed between myself and others.When I was about 13, one of my best friends father died. It was a chainsaw accident, the blade kicked back while he was cutting brush and cut most of the way through his neck. His wife was the one who found him. It was the first major outpouring of grief that I had ever had to witness, and I think it was the first time that I realized that I would have to put on a show to avoid being though of as heartless. I wasn't very good at it, but I used the oldest excuse: I'm in shock, I'll process my emotions later.Shortly thereafter, I took a trip to Africa and watched people live the worst life possible and felt no sympathy for them. I could only feel disdain for them. I saw it as their fault that they could not pick themselves up, that they wasted what little they had on worthless shit like cell phones. I attributed these feelings to the antimalarial drug I was taking, mefloquine, which has been known to have unpredictable psychological effects.At this point, of course, none of this seemed odd to me. It occurred to me that everyone must be doing something like this. After all, people always talk about everyone wearing masks. Maybe I am not so different?Near the end of high school, I began to notice some other oddities about myself. Before then, I had never thought of myself as a manipulative person. As I thought about my interactions with people, however, I realized that, while I never was popular, I couldn't remember any time where I had a conversation or argument where I had not gotten what I wanted. People always had a favourable impression of me. It wasn't that I was trying to manipulate people specifically, it was just that I would decide what I wanted to happen, start talking to them, and it would happen. More recently (I am now 23), I have taken to more conscious exercise of this skill, making a game out of attempting to elicit certain responses from the people around me.I also began having episodes which I would describe as "rage breaks" in an otherwise completely calm persona. It didn't take much, but it took a very specific type of incident, and I would lose control for short bursts of time. Minor incidents usually involved someone's assertion that they were more important or more powerful than I was. More major incidents were usually stemmed from a similar cause but involved physical aggression towards me as well. My responses in those times ranged from insults to throwing someone through a door.
Monday, December 12, 2011
The morality of libertarians
This will be interesting and relevant to many of you. A reader sent me this article about recent research performed on the moral leanings of libertarians, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology." As described by Reason:
Probably the most interesting part of this article, though, was the discussion of the Empathizer-Systematizer scale:When it comes to morality, libertarians are often typecast as immoral calculating rationalists who also have a somewhat unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research shows that libertarians are quite moral, just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are.***[T]he study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales and much higher on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity scales. In this case, libertarians scored low on all five surveyed moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” notes the study. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on Harm and slightly above on Fairness. This suggests that libertarians “are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”The Schwartz Value scale measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on Hedonism, Self-Direction, and Stimulation than either liberals or conservatives and they put less value than either on Benevolence, Conformity, Security, and Tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on Power, but like conservatives they value Universalism less. Universalism is defined as “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and nature.” All three put high value on Achievement. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.”***“Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.***“Libertarians are high in Openness to Experience and seem to enjoy effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks. In combination with low levels of emotional reactivity, the highly rational nature of libertarians may lead them to a logical, rather than emotional, system of morality.”
The scale measures the tendency to empathize, defined as "the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion," and to systemize, or "the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system." Libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing—and they scored a lot higher. The authors go on to suggest that systemizing is “characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.” They then add, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’”Yes, tendency to systematize instead of empathize is something that libertarians, sociopaths, and autistics have in common.
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