Thursday, October 25, 2012

Sociopaths the conspiracy theory

From a reader:


It's been a long time. There's a lot going on in my life right now, and I realized that I kind of missed your blog.

I was looking through some articles on the Tikkun Magazine website, and I was surprised to see no less than two articles about the psychopathic percent of the population on the front page. I'm not sure what your perspective would be, so I suggest you take a look for yourself:

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/sociopaths-rule

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/dealing-with-psychopaths

It was an interesting experience to read them for me. While the second article, at least, is less alarmist than most such narratives, the mention of 'containing' psychopathic behavior, as opposed, presumably, to working with it, coming up over and over again is rather telling. It seems that in both articles antisocial thinking is something not attributed to people the reader may know, but to some mysterious class of demi-human way out there in the economic wilderness. Apparently, both the article-writers seem to be thinking that while possibly 1% of the population has antisocial tendencies, those tendencies couldn't possibly be attributed to the reader or anyone the reader knows personally and has contact with on a regular basis. It's subtle, but I found it intriguing.

I think this sort of thing has become a kind of elephant in the room in society at large. There's a lot of talk about sociopaths, but not really much examination of them as ordinary citizens. Do you get an impression like that?


Both articles are interesting in different ways. The first one seems to equate sociopathy with a list of social ills, without much proof. The second is more thoughtful but is also alarmingly alarmist. But I agree that sociopathic traits are not exclusive to sociopaths.

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Sociopath quotes: zombies

Do you ever feel as if the world is full of zombies? Mindless people who merely obey the dictates of society and their own emotions, showing no sign of rationality, letting others decide who and what they’re going to be in this life, regurgitating moral nostrums as if they were pearls of the highest wisdom, attacking those who are not like them and wanting desperately to turn all outsiders into exact replicas of themselves... ?

“...The purpose of man's life...is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.”

-- Ayn Rand

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Famous sociopaths: Mitt Romney?

I was reading a profile about Mitt Romney in the New Yorker. One of the themes was how he doesn't seem to have principles or emotions but how he defines himself as being just an efficiency machine? Or that's sort of what I got from it:

  • Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals (unless you think those are large social goals). 
  • “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.”
  • Kim Clark says that Romney was “very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. You have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.”
  • "Mitt is so persuasive. He could get rich selling used bubble gum.
  • Romney has done a lot of meeting and a lot of selling during his rise in business and politics, but mainly indoors, in small groups of peers. He’s as adept in that setting as he is unnatural talking to a big crowd. Unlike most candidates, he did not communicate a sense either of being too restless to give you his full attention or of having to establish that he is the alpha and you the beta. He was direct and pleasant and engaged. His voice sounded husky, rather than flat. His gestures seemed spontaneous, not staged.
  • “Value, in the way I’ve defined it, is the score that shows up on the scoreboard,” he said. “It’s not the objective. It’s not the strategy. 

If that doesn't convince you, this New Yorker article titled "Romney Sets New Personal Best for Faking Empathy"?


“Mitt Romney has the facial expressions of someone who cares about me.”

Moments after the debate, Mr. Romney pronounced himself “thoroughly drained” by the forced display of humanity.

“This empathy stuff is exhausting,” he told reporters. “On Day One, it’s going to stop.”


I actually don't think that Romney is a sociopath, although it's possible. I do think it's funny that people seem to value people who have empathy -- would rather have those people in stressful situations making emotional decisions rather than a sociopath? Or maybe people are actually aware and ok with the fact that politicians tend to be more sociopathic than non?

Monday, October 22, 2012

Power


I love power. I'm fascinated by it. The power over self. The power over others. I think the power over self definitely should preceed the power over others. I've learned this over time of studying and practicing it.

It is interesting to read about world leaders in history who have started powerless and who had been thrust into a position of power without being prepared for it. They start off idealists, wanting only the best for mankind, only to be thrown on a downward spiral committing atrocities for what they perceived as the betterment of mankind or their country. I truly understand them.

I can't tell you that I'm partisan to any particular brand of ideology. I have studied all of them deeply. Communism and fascism are the most interesting when it comes to power, because it thrusts absolute power into the hands of a few people. Indeed capitalism does still keep power in the hands of a few, but not as little as you can count on two hands.

We don't have a lot of fascist leaders to compare, as the idea never gained enough popularity worldwide to have any long standing leaders. I have always found fascism to be power given to the impatent. It's guided by insecurity. As usual the theory actually makes a little sense to anyone who can look at it objectively: It's a structure of government that believes that people don't want freedom. It believes the strong should survive and the weak should perish. Individualism should be sacrificed for the state. Quoting Mussolini, "Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State...." Absolute power indeed. The fascists' insecurity, however, is written in their ideology from the gate. They reject liberalism and communism for the fact that they blame these ideologies for their losses in the first world war. This was the platform to which Mussolini and Hitler rose to power. It was the insecurity of the masses in these countries that propelled two insecure people into power.

The claim of supremacy of the Aryan race and throwbacks to a ancient civilization of glory were examples of this. The point the finger attitude of hating Jews, liberals, communists, France, etc. were yet another. I wouldn't claim Hitler a sociopath purely for the fact that his entire campaign and life rested on his insecurity and over-emotionalism. I won't delve deep into his life, as I'm not trying to write a biography on him, however those who have should throw a comment up on your opinion.

Communism is a doctrine that thrusts power into the hands of the powerless. I do believe the intentions of a majority of the leaders of communist revolutions to be genuine. Notice I said majority. People like Pol Pot I believe had no intention of furthering anything, but his lust for power and blood. Why do I think so? The foundation of communism is to create a egalitarian society. One where the workers who produce the products are in control. That's why they call it a dictatorship of the proletariat. For the sociopath at the top, this is a terrible idea. How then would they exploit the workers? For the powerless sociopath, this was a wonderful idea. What better way to gain popular support but to say that you would be giving everyone equality, and control over their own labor? I will use Stalin for a example.

If Stalin wasn't a sociopath I will hand over my control to this website to Love Fraud. Hands down. Stalin's rap sheet as a young revolutionary is long: Armed robbery, kidnapping, assassination, counterfeiting, extortion, racketeering, inciting riots, and finally insurrection. Stalin manipulated his way into power. Such as his alliance with Kamenev and Zinoviev, which he used to make sure that Lenin's testament (Which had orders not to let Stalin in power) would never be revealed. After Stalin's death he shifted his alliance to another party member and had them both ejected from the party. Stalin's path while in power was one of a heroin addict with a unlimited supply of junk. He started executing anyone who opposed him. Even to go as far as having a assassin stab Trotsky (Former party member in exile) to death with a ice pick. He had his armies throw themselves into the enemies' guns in WWII resulting in the largest amount of casualties in a country during the world war. He changed history books to the point of erasing people out of pictures who he deemed counter revolutionary. This would mean erasing people's entire existence for going against him. His own son tried to commit suicide after Stalin told him he was a failure. Upon receiving the news he said, "He can't even shoot straight." After being captured by the Germans Stalin refused to trade for him saying that if he did it would be special treatment and not fair to the rest of the "Sons of Russia." Stalin's son then succeeded in running himself into a electric fence in the concentration camp. I believe Stalin was a sociopath given a cause and as he grew more powerful he lost vision of what exactly that cause was. In the end his cause was staying in power. The funny thing is he died with his only possession being his uniform. His power.

Power is raw and uncut. Its lure is subtle, but its taste is explosive. You have a little and you keep wanting more. The more you have it, the more you will excuse using it vicariously. You'll justify your every callous action with vigour. Soon you are nothing but a embodiment of fear and manipulation. You still think you are fighting for what you were in the beginning, but you're only fighting to maintain your position. As all the threats real and perceived mount, you become more awful in your preservation of it. In the end it's easy to lose sight, or is the real intention deep down inside everyone of us power itself? Sometimes it's hard to know. Even for the person fighting it.

Raw

Someone once remarked that I rarely discuss any negative emotions I experience -- joy, elation, success, but rarely sadness. Maybe it's because I frequently forget my negative emotions soon after I've experienced them. Because apart from feelings of disappointment, most of my negative feelings seem to be without context or meaning. If anything, the dominant sensation of them is a sense of meaningless, typically brought on by a lack of sleep or mental exhaustion. I call it feeling "raw." It is a feeling of introspection but without any real thing to introspect upon. The result is a loop of thinking about nothing, which gives me a sensation of nothingness.

Today I feel raw. I knew I would. I have had a murderous travel schedule recently. I've moved and am alone in a new city. Instead of going outside, I spent most of the day watching trite television dramas. I like to watch bad television with unrealistic interpersonal situations in which it feels like the writers are forcing the characters to endure awkward and unnecessary drama as if the writer were an ancient god playing humans like puppets. (For this reason, I have also become a surprising fan of fanfiction.) It reminds me of my own desire to play god and to pit people against each other just to see what sort of effect I might have upon the unsuspecting. This was fine, but one of the main characters died. I had just had a conversation with one of my friends about a mutual friend dying. The death was expected but came unexpectedly soon. We had both planned to visit her before she died, but she slipped away without saying goodbye to anyone, like she did in "real life" at parties, I had joked with my friend. I like to do that at parties too, I thought privately to myself. Maybe I wouldn't mind doing that in "real life" as well. I kept watching the television drama, to see how and why the story arc needed this particular character death, and apparently it was just to throw all of the other characters completely off-kilter and into a spiral of self-destructive depression.

I got up and walked to the (dog) park in my new neighborhood. I have been there often enough to know the perfect place to escape the encroaching shadows of the trees as the seasons change in the northern hemisphere. I listened to music until I just listened to one piece over and over again, from one of my favorite works to play. A small dog came and snuggled up next to me for several minutes. I didn't shoo him away. I took a photo of a crescent moon in blue sky surrounded by streaks of clouds and made it the "wallpaper" for my phone. Maybe seeing it tomorrow (this time) I will remember how it feels to be sad.

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