Sunday, November 25, 2012

Machiavelli for dummies

Power is a sociopath's drug. It's his very reason for living. It's no wonder sociopaths are attracted to positions of power in business, politics, criminal cartels, etc. And who better to learn it from than medieval power brokers like Machiavelli. Here are some comments on Machiavelli's philosophies and their role in the business world, courtesy of Forbes.

It's good cautionary advice for anyone, particularly for minorities like sociopaths who are vulnerable to attack.
[M]isjudging your relationship with powerful people can jeopardize your career, your health and your bank balance. Open any newspaper and you will find the stories of those who abused their power and those who became their victims.
And why we should accept our sociopath selves:
The key to effective leadership is self-knowledge and self-acceptance. This is not what most people imagine when they think of Machiavelli. But men like Borgia were destroyed precisely because they lacked self-knowledge. Had Borgia recognized his weaknesses, he would have taken a different path. But only strong people can acknowledge their weaknesses.

Self-acceptance is equally important. Once we accept our imperfections, they lose their power and others cannot use them to manipulate us. We find the courage needed to speak the truth to power. And we find it easier to accept the imperfections in others. Whether we lead or follow, self-knowledge and self-acceptance are indispensable.
And parting thoughts:
Machiavelli teaches us to take responsibility for our relationship with power. This is not obligatory, of course, but merely wise. Understanding Machiavelli gives us a richer appreciation for human nature. It allows us to foresee problems, defuse dangerous situations and make wiser decisions.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Married to a murderer

This was an interesting article from a woman who was married to a known murderer (supposedly reformed), that apparently suffered from other "demons" that caused him to rape and almost kill two women one month into their marriage. It's an interesting tale if you have ever wondered how women could possibly be with someone who is so horrible but still not be aware of his true nature:

The Jason who'd been presented to me was not a man I'd ever met. He wasn't even the 18-year-old I'd tried to envision so many times and whom I'd come to accept as the correctional system's "best guy", someone who would never again pose a threat of violence. He was now a rapist.

He was now a rapist? I mean, you read her description and don't really think she's an idiot. But then she says something like this and you wonder, does she really think that he just suddenly became a different person? That this man is something that her own husband was not?

Friday, November 23, 2012

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Stanford prison experiment

A reader sent me this video and the following description:


I don't know if you're familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, but it was basically a two week simulation in which college students were put in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford, some acting as guards, some acting as prisoners, and let things run their course. The whole thing was quite a fiasco. It's used in psychology classes across America to demonstrate basically what not to do when performing an experiment.

What I'm most interested in, however, is the behavior of one of the participants, by the name of Dave Eshleman, who acted as a guard. It is, in my opinion, a rather clear cut example of remorseless sociopathy. In this video he speaks of his role in the experiment. He first appears at 6:20 or so, talking about how he was recruited. But he appears several times throughout, both in an interview and in raw footage from the experiment, explaining the acts he committed with a peculiar note of what I identified as pride. He doesn't appear to show any remorse; in fact, he seems to laugh about some of the atrocities he committed at some points. He talks about how he created a new persona for himself, adopting a Southern accent to appear more tough. He refers to his part in the experiment as "playing a role" several times in the video, yet he admits that he was the primary instigator of the terror that the guards put the prisoners through. The footage of the decompression after the experiment was halted, where he comes face to face with one of the prisoners he tormented is quite interesting.

I'm curious what you and the SW community have to say about this.



I watched it and found that the most relevant points occur at:

18 minutes, where he gets "creative" about evil

21:45 small sacrifice

25:20 now he's aware of evil

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

No remorse

I have been meaning to do a post on this New Yorker article "No Remorse," about the sentencing of adolescent murderers who do not have the same sorts of life experience that would cause them to realize the consequences of their behavior. These teenagers typically do not show the right amount of "remorse" in the minds of some, and are consequently labeled sociopaths, sentenced to life in prison.


The expectation that defendants will display remorse either shortly after their crimes or never is generally accepted as common sense. In a Columbia Law Review study of cases of juveniles charged with violent crimes, the Emory law professor Martha Grace Duncan found that youths who failed to express their contrition promptly and appropriately, as adults would, were often penalized for showing “less grief than the system demands.” In many cases, she writes, the juveniles appeared to be in shock or in a kind of dissociative state and failed to appreciate the permanence of what they had done. “Less under the sway of the reality principle,” they were more prone than adults to engage in forms of denial. But prosecutors and judges interpreted their strange reactions—falling asleep after the crime, giggling, rapping—as signs of irreparable depravity. Duncan found that courts looked for remorse in “psychologically naïve ways, without regard for defense mechanisms, developmental stages, or the ambiguity that inheres in human behavior.”

One of Dakotah’s closest friends, Christina Wardlaw, who sat through the trial, told me that she had to suppress the urge to laugh as she listened to Dakotah’s recorded conversations with the police. “He still saw himself as the same old Dakotah, jabbering and singing and making jokes,” she said. “He had no idea what he’d become.”

Dakotah’s reaction, with its apparent remorselessness, less than three hours after shooting his grandfather, was discussed by three witnesses for the prosecution. It also figured in the jurors’ deliberations. They asked to view Dakotah’s videotaped conversation with the detective again, and an hour after watching the tape, and just three hours after beginning deliberations, they announced that Dakotah was guilty of first-degree homicide.

One juror told me that several people on the jury were troubled by Dakotah’s youth, but they’d been instructed that if the evidence indicated that the offense was premeditated and deliberate the crime was first-degree murder. Age had no place in that calculus. As is required under Michigan law, the jury was not informed that the conviction carried the automatic penalty of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

The video from yesterday reminded me of this article, the cannibal's comment about how there are consequences to killing someone, and if he had known that earlier many people would still be alive. I had a dream about this recently. I had gotten called in to consult with a child who had just murdered a third party to get back at someone else, like murdered a mutual friend to hurt another person. She was young, maybe 8 years old. I saw some video of her before I was going to meet with her and she was talking about it as if she was talking about how she had stolen someone's bicycle. It was very clear that she didn't understand that killing someone had consequences. I wondered -- should I explain to this girl that killing has consequences? If she's normal but just a little immature, like this Dakotah kid seems to be, then those consequences might weigh her down for the rest of the life until she's just a pile of human garbage. On the other hand, isn't knowing that our actions have consequences what helps us make "better" decisions?
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