Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Sociopath quote of the day: onlookers

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

-- Henry Louis Mencken

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Help?

Pardon the interruption to your daily programming, I'll probably take this down in a bit so don't start chatting here. I am making a "Can you spot the sociopath" quiz for the book promotion. I wanted to give short examples of something and have someone guess whether it's a sociopath, or something else, the something else probably being either: autism spectrum, borderline personality disorder, schizoid, narcissist, asshole, machiavellian, etc.

UPDATE: ALSO NEED JUST PURE ASSHOLE-ISH BEHAVIOR, OR OVEREMOTIONAL, JEALOUS RAGE, ETC. THAT MAY MAKE YOU LOOK LIKE YOUR CRAZY IN THAT MOMENT BECAUSE OF A MOMENTARY LAPSE OF JUDGMENT--ANYTHING THAT YOU ARE ASHAMED OF, SPILL IT!

Here's a sociopath example:
Q. Pat's co-worker confesses that she has been on the kidney donor transplant list for the past three years and undergoes weekly dialysis. Pay immediately offers his own kidney. Her doctors don't even consider him because obvious differences in race and size make him not a suitable candidate. 
A. This could be altruism (for obvious reasons) or it could be a sociopathic. According to the sociopath "I’m not 100% sure why I made that offer. I was ready to be tested if it came to that, but of course I assumed it wouldn't -- I assumed correctly. But just making the gesture sealed her to me. I’d be lying if I said I planned it all that way. I knew there would be some advantage of course, but not the extent of it or how useful she would actually end up being to me years later."   
I'd really like examples from all of the socio related characterizations as well (as well as additional socio stories). Hopefully this example illustrates what I am looking for -- very short (1-3 sentences) explanation of the situation followed by another short explanation of why you might have done it (if you were normal, or a sociopath), but why you actually did it. The examples can either be very obvious, quintessential traits of who you are, or surprising traits like the example above. Strong preference for personal stories by people who have either been diagnosed or self-identify as the particular disorder. Please follow the format above.

Soul searching

A reader asks: "How is it that sociopaths can 'see' someone's soul or see people as they truly are? How come the rest of society doesn't see the person for who they really are?" My response:
That is such a good question. I feel that you probably only notice the sociopath's ability to see because it is such an unusual perspective, everybody else's perceptive abilities are so familiar to you that they have become emotional background noise (Von Restorff effect?). As a thought experiment, stop and listen to all of the noise around you. Try to identify the source of all the noise you hear, whether street noise, other people, television, radio, automobile noises, wind, etc. You never pay attention to this noise, never even notice it is there most of the time because you are so used to it. You only notice things that are out of the ordinary.

I think a similar thing happens with empaths reading people. You are probably very used to other empaths seeing things about you that you never told them, e.g. when people see your face and realize that you are sad, when people don't stand too close to you because they realize you need your personal space, when people don't either scream at you or whisper at you. With all these behaviors, other empaths are seeing parts of who you truly are and acting accordingly.

Sociopaths see things that you never told them too, just not always the same things a typical empath would see. First, sociopaths have a very different focus, different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, e.g. you no longer love your spouse, or hate your boss, or are having an affair, or can't stand your children, the sociopath remains undistracted. It's like telling a joke to a kid with autism -- your attempts at subterfuge will simply not always have the same effects on a sociopath as they have on empaths. Second, sociopaths are students of human interactions, closely studying others so they can pick up on the right social cues to blend in, imitate normal behavior, etc. The truth is that the more you pay attention to something, the more aware you will be. I am a musician, and I can listen to a recording and tell exactly what is going on, who is playing what, even the way the music was mixed in the studio. You could learn that too, if you practiced as much as a musician does.

I think this is what you are referring to when you say that sociopaths seem to be able to see a person's soul or see people as they truly are. Or maybe it is more of an extraordinary bias in which you honestly don't expect a sociopath to understand anything, so when they do they seem very clever? I don't actually know, these are just my guesses.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Narcissists in the news: Paul Frampton

In the NY Times Magazine, headlined "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble," a hilarious profile of a raging narcissist getting "catfished" into being a drug mule and stuck in an Argentinian prison. It is one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in the past year or two, maybe. Great pacing! Worth reading in its entirety! But just in case you're lazy, here are the selections that scream narcissist to me:

  • Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.
  • Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
  • “I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said.
  • Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”
  • Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. . . . “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”
  • “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.”
  • Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. 
  • In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.”
  • When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever.
  • "This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity."







Sunday, March 10, 2013

Deconstructing performances

Photo by Gavin Whitner.

I grew up in a family of musicians and we would regularly go see all sorts of musical and dramatic performances. Always on the trips back home we would deconstruct whatever it was that we had just seen or heard, a particularly powerful performance or a flubbed line. We had been trained to see things with a critical eye and this was our opportunity to participate ourselves in the performance and show off for each other. I used to love giving some insight that would elicit praise and agreement from my parents and siblings. I was proud to have discriminating taste. But I also enjoyed hearing others' opinions. They were teaching me to look for things I wouldn't have otherwise seen, listen for things I wouldn't otherwise have heard. Once I became a performer myself, these sessions were doubly interesting to me because they would validate my own performance choices, or point out areas for improvement -- pricking my pride and feeding the flame of my ambition. And that's what made any of these performances interesting to me -- my own engagement with them during, but especially being able to savor them after.

It's funny, I have always had the impulse to "dish" with people after things. That's one of the few truly worthwhile things about having at least a few friends who are gossipy fishwives.

In my relationships I always have this moment of "big reveal," where I feel like it is suddenly ok to rehash all initial encounters, at the time fraught with uncertainty and intrigue, and give the backstories and internal monologues that were hidden at the time ("I was so worried when you found out about X, but luckily I had the idea to play it off as Y"). I love to brag about things -- how I seduced them, or marked them as a target long before I was even on their radar. The actual dance steps of a relationship are an ok distraction for me, but the true pleasure is getting to deconstruct it all with the person months or years later.

Last night, coming home from a performance with someone I am currently engaged with, I realized the parallel between my childhood performance critiques and my adult relationship rehashings -- I am performing in relationships. I guess everybody does, but my main interest is not just to acquire the other person, but to perform the process beautifully. Without the promise of having an audience (even of only one or two), I don't think I would care to engage.
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