Sunday, December 2, 2012

Questions from readers

Here are some questions from a reader and my responses in regards to this post:
i'm curious why you didn't say 'I love you too' to your sister. I for one have always had trouble saying it to my family, but not to anyone else. The only conclusion I've come to is that I know my family knows who I really am, they see past the superficial, and know that I don't really get what it even means to love someone. With girlfriends it's easier, they start out as strangers so it's easy for me to create that role since they will take it as truth.

Is there a reason you left it out?
Ha, I'm glad you picked up on that. I purposefully didn't say "I love you too" because I didn't want to be disingenuous with my sister. I lie or pretend with strangers much more than with family. I guess part of it is because I know they won't believe certain false emotions. But more than that, I don't want to have to put on a show for them. It's exhausting to always pretend to be someone you're not. And I don't think being a sociopath should mean you have to live in the shadows. I mean, fine for those who want to live in the shadows all their lives and be what a friend termed "shadow players," but we should at least have a choice. I think sociopaths should have the same legitimacy that other empathy-challenged people enjoy: aspies, ADHD, etc. I don't want to have to pretend around my family because I don't want to feel like I always have to pretend. I actually want some people to know and like me for who I really am. And that is what family is there for -- unconditional love and/or acceptance. Or at least that is the bargain that my own family has worked out amongst ourselves.

Similarly, this question:
How do you categorize sociopaths who are willing to be open about it? Does that willingness mean they're not fully sociopathic? Maybe its the inherent narcissism (everyone has at least some) coming out, wanting others to fear and respect? I know my goal was to purposefully create fear when I was open about it. What's your purpose?
Like I said in response to the last question, I'm open about being a sociopath sometimes because I don't want to feel like I can never be open about it. I don't see how that would make someone not sociopathic. I mean, I don't shout it form the rooftops or anything, of course. but if I always have to pretend, then I am the powerless one -- I am the sheep subject to other people's whims, not the empaths.

I think it is shortsighted for sociopaths to believe that they will gain more for remaining hidden than they ever would through selective exposure. first of all, i think that sociopaths will not always be able to remain hidden. scientists, geneticists, psychologists are all looking for ways to tag sociopaths. sociopaths are subjected to tests that are then used to legally persecute them based on their sociopathy, either in enhancing jail sentences as an "aggravating factor," keeping them from parole, or keeping them from seeing their children. in addition to the legally sanctioned discrimination, there is a lot of informal hate for sociopaths. people crazy hate sociopaths, and sociopaths are easy to hate because we're faceless. if we banded together like the aspie's and other empathy-challenged, we could see some political/social gain and/or acceptance for our kind that would be greater than the sum all of the shadow playing from individual sociopaths. or let's have our cake and eat it too. at least i think that those scenarios are enough of a possiblity that it is smart to start laying the groundwork now for a worldwide sociopath PR campaign.

also i like to brag about certain conquests. what's the worth of skillful power plays if you can't ever share your successes?

Saturday, December 1, 2012

War = sociopath breeding ground

On the topic of whether sociopaths are born or created, I just heard about the Japanese movie Battle Royale, in which a class of high school students is sent to an island to kill or be killed until there is one left standing. According to an imdb synopsis:
At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan is in a a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence among the nation's youth is spiraling out of control. With schoolchildren boycotting their classes and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act Overseen by their former teacher Kitano and requiring that a randomly chosen school class is taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil is allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobedience.
The students have varied reactions:
Some of the kids immediately embrace the carnage, others reluctantly join in for self-preservation, others gather together into smaller groups that war with each other, still others seduce allies in, only to kill them in short order, and still others kill themselves in refusal to participate in the violence. The problems arise even in the groups of trusted souls as a greedy suspicion grasps them all. Those that don't succumb to this violent infidelity, surely risk falling victim to their external classmates' hunts.
When I first heard about the plot of the movie, I thought the island was meant to serve as an accelerant for natural selection. Of course if you are putting high school students on an island with weapons, the only thing you would be naturally selecting for is sociopaths. Under my revised-per-imdb understanding of the film, the island is not just naturally selecting out sociopaths, it is actually creating them out of normal empaths. Do I think this actually happens in war and other times of exigency? Yes, I do.

Friday, November 30, 2012

Sociopath quote of the day

There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, "These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever is the opposite of a bird of prey must be good," there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument--though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb."

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Manipulation 102: retail sales

I was reading this NY Times article on the clothing brand Zara and was impressed by how they managed to create and sustain demand for their products. First of all, they are faceless, their founder never having given an interview and their designers nameless:

Ortega has never given an interview, according to his communications department, nor does he attend award ceremonies or parties. He rarely allows his picture to be taken. Pablo Isla, who took over the company when the 76-year-old Ortega stepped down as chairman last year, rarely gives interviews or waves to the camera, either. In fact, the public face of Inditex is its soft-spoken communications director, Jesus Echevarría, who, as I discovered during a recent visit to the Inditex complex, is perhaps the only communications director on the planet who all but apologizes whenever he must answer questions about Inditex’s runaway success.
***
Inditex owes none of its success to advertising. That’s because Inditex doesn’t advertise. It hardly even has a marketing department, and it doesn’t engage in flashy campaigns, as its competitors do, teaming up with fashion designers like Stella McCartney, Karl Lagerfeld, Martin Margiela and Marni. Zara’s designers are completely anonymous; some would say this is because they are copiers rather than designers.

I actually think this is one of the bigger benefits of having an anonymous blog -- being nameless and faceless just makes it easier for people to project what they want to see onto you.

Zara doesn't self-promote, instead they let their satisfied customers talk them up:

“In New York, they did one page saying they were opening — in The New York Times,” Echevarría said. “But it’s not a campaign; it’s an announcement; it’s information. The company does not talk about itself. The idea was that the client was to talk about the company. It was not to say how good it could be. The customer would say that if it was deserved.”

This is one of my favorite ways to seduce, partly because I'm actually very lazy about it. I would much rather just become known as somewhat of a desired commodity and have people come to me rather than the other way around. Although I do sometimes go out with the goal of meeting people and can be very aggressive when I want to be, I find that I get better longterm results this way. People think it's their choice and that gives them a false sense of control and they have an incentive to keep justifying the choice to themselves (who wants to admit they were wrong?) by continuing to idealize me.

Zara is not a one-model fits all operation, it (sneakily) tries to closely follow the idiosyncrasies of its clientele:

But a brand at Inditex will make a fall collection, for example, and then ship only three or four dresses or shirts or jackets in each style to a store. There’s very little leftover stock, few extra-smalls or mediums hiding in the back. But store managers can request more if there’s demand. They also monitor customers’ reactions, on the basis of what they buy and don’t buy, and what they say to a sales clerk: “I like this scooped collar” or “I hate zippers at the ankles.” Inditex says its sales staff is trained to draw out these sorts of comments from their customers. Every day, store managers report this information to headquarters, where it is then transmitted to a vast team of in-house designers, who quickly develop new designs and send them to factories to be turned into clothes.
***
That means that if Inditex stores in London, Tokyo and São Paulo all have customers responding enthusiastically to, let’s say, sequined cranberry-colored hot pants, Inditex can deliver more of these, or a variation on hot pants, sequins or that cranberry color, to stores within three weeks. The company tries to keep the stock fresh; one promise its stores make is that you will always be buying something nearly unique. Merchandise moves incredibly quickly, even by fast-fashion standards. All those thousands of Inditex stores receive deliveries of new clothes twice a week.

This reminded me of the way I will constantly datamine little tidbits of information on people to add to my  mental dossiers of them that help me cater to their unique desires.

Finally, they promote a feeling of scarcity, causing people to want to buy when they feel the urge because the opportunity may never present itself again:

In this way, says Masoud Golsorkhi, the editor of Tank, a London magazine about culture and fashion, Inditex has completely changed consumer behavior. “When you went to Gucci or Chanel in October, you knew the chances were good that clothes would still be there in February,” he says. “With Zara, you know that if you don’t buy it, right then and there, within 11 days the entire stock will change. You buy it now or never. And because the prices are so low, you buy it now.”

This one is probably the hardest for me to pull off if I am honestly interested in the person, but I have seen it be very effective when I truly am only feeling a fleeting interest in a person. Ah well, there is always room for improvement.

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Sociopaths and impulsive helpfulness

At Narcissistworld, they featured this video about helping people.


And this quote about how there might be situations in which sociopaths are most likely to help:

Normal people get too bothered witnessing suffering to keep seeing it. Narcissists don’t care – they are too focused on their own story, judging the losers in a way that makes them feel good about themselves, etc. But sociopaths can really see the suffering and keep going.

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