Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Sociopath child, to teen, to adult

Based on my own personal experiences and the experiences of many others, I have come to believe that there are certain key developmental stages that most (high-functioning?) sociopaths experience when growing up. I believe these developmental experiences are much more consistent across young sociopaths than the trinity of animal torture, fire play, and bed wetting, albeit less observable by a third party.

Sociopath child tends to slip under the radar at first because all young children are self-centered and frequently perverse. He is unaware that he is different from others until about age 11 or 12. At this age, he realizes that he has missed a cognitive/emotional fork in the road somewhere along the way (age of 4-6?), a departure from the developmental path of his peers that does not manifest itself until years later. This manifestation is characterized by a short Asperger's like social awkwardness and social rejection beginning just before the age of puberty. All of sociopath child's hormonally/emotionally driven peers are acting differently, and in ways that sociopath child doesn't understand or respect. Sociopath child doesn't play their game at first, doesn't bother to try to pretend to be an idiot like them, insisting instead that they adapt to him. They do not adapt to him, but rather reject him socially as being a nonconformist "weirdo". It becomes clear to pre-teen sociopath relatively quickly (1-2 months?) that the days of effortless fitting in that he enjoyed throughout his childhood are over. The rules have changed, his survival instincts kick in, and he realizes at some level that even if he can't understand why his peers are behaving the way they do, he must learn to adapt. Specifically sociopath teen must learn how to actively pretend to be like everyone else. In terms of mask-wearing skills, pre-teen sociopath is like the smart kid who has always "naturally" done well at school, who suddenly goes to secondary school or university and realizes that he must study to get good marks. Likewise, although child sociopath "naturally" fit in with ease, pre-teen sociopath must learn people study skills. He will use these skills in monitoring his peers to discover what he is missing and to mirror these traits back to them.

Young teen sociopath eventually overcomes this little roadblock (1-2 years?) by acquiring a baseline proficiency at mimicry and manipulation. This process hardens him to the humanity of others. To accomplish his goals, he has resorted to objectifying everyone around him, seeing them either as targets, threats, or assets.

Teen sociopath gets more reckless with his manipulation exploits as he gets more comfortable with his skills. He sometimes makes mistakes, pushes people too far, makes people very angry. These moments are frequently overlooked or quickly papered over because his peers are in such developmental flux themselves. His worst moments are written off as being hormonally based or isolated incidents. As his peers mature, however, teen sociopath's tactics will begin to seem heavy handed and artificial to them. They will tire of the manipulation and will start responding negatively to his primitive skills.

As late teen sociopath begins experiencing more pushback/blowback from his increasingly riskier exploits, he will begin to see that the majority of his life consists of manipulation and mask wearing. Late teen sociopath begins to truly understand who he is only after one of his friends hates him.
-->
Despite his increasing social difficulties, late teen sociopath will try to ignore the warning signs that suggest that he is not just different, but damaged. This is, after all, the only way of life he has ever known. He will do anything to maintain his status quo, including going to war against anyone who would threaten it, including himself.

Self-deception will reach a fever pitch in the early twenties as he tries to convince himself that nothing is wrong with him or what he is doing. Young adult sociopath will eventually hit some form of rock bottom, however it is that he defines that to himself. If he is smart, this will be the impetus for him to do some deep "soul" searching, and come up with some other, more sustainable way of living. If he is not smart, he will keep repeating this pattern indefinitely -- cheap manipulation tricks, backlash, self-deception, return to the status quo of cheap tricks.

For the sociopaths who move beyond the cycle of self-deception, the typical age of self-awareness is early to mid twenties, although it can still happen into the early thirties.

This is what I have come to expect in the portrayal of the development of a sociopath from small child through his mid-twenties, at least in broad strokes. Again, I think these are relatively consistent experiences, at least among high-functioning sociopaths. Depending on where the sociopath is in the stage, though, they may or may not see things this way. For instance, child sociopath doesn't realize he is manipulating, pre-teen may not necessarily be able to articulate a missed "cognitive fork," etc., but I have found that sociopaths who make it out of the cycle of self-deception will more or less recognize themselves in this description. Thoughts?

Monday, September 30, 2013

The Gervais Principle (part 3)

A reader sent me a link to the latest edition of the Gervais Principle. From the reader:

Have you read the final installment of the Gervais Principle? You mentioned the previous installments in older posts, but the last section is much more insightful and relevant to sociopaths than the previous ones. 

Venkat basically describes sociopaths as ultimate social nihilists that progressively learn that every single ideal or moral calculus that gives meaning to human existence as social constructs. In the end, sociopaths find immense freedom in a world that has no meaning except what they create or choose to acknowledge. This means that sociopaths can still coexist peacefully (social contracts), both with empaths and other socios. I identify very strongly with this nihilism, and I have frequently mentioned the idea of an absent god before I read the Gervais Principle, but I also feel that you do not identify very strongly with this description, given your adherence to the tenets of Mormonism, unless I am misinterpreting you. What are your thoughts? 

Here's what I replied (makes the most sense if you read the article first):

Thanks for this! I enjoyed it a lot. I especially liked this part:

"The mask-ripping process itself becomes revealed as an act within the last theater of social reality, the one within which at least manipulating social realities seems to be a meaningful process in some meta-sense. Game design with good and evil behaviors."
I feel like a lot of sociopaths stop at that stage for a while. They give me a hard time for revealing their methods, as if playing a game was any less meaningless than everything the empaths are up to.

I think it is that sort of nihilism that allowed me to write the book and be so flippant about it and possible ramifications. Some people think my zen attitude is from my mormonism. Maybe. It is true that if you believe in religion then a lot of things in life just don't matter much. But if you don't believe in religion, then for sure nothing in life matters much. So that's where I sort of am on Mormonism. I'd like to think that I will continue to exist forever and be a god. If that doesn't work out, oh well, there's really no such thing as "wasting time" doing one thing over another. But I do think my conception of God is really different from most people's, including most Mormons. The Otherwise Occupied God, or the God who might care about us but has the perspective to not really be as caught up as we think he might be in what all we get up to (or he cares about different things than we think).

The article's most basic argument, in reference to the emphasis that the "losers" place on social interactions and the accompanying emotional checks and balances:

But by their very nature, emotions overweight social behavior over material substance. Having a $100 bill thrown contemptuously at you hurts. Being politely handed $10 feels good. The Loser mind, predictably, sees the first act as a slight and seeks revenge, and the second act as nice and seeks to repay it.

We saw an example from the The Office last time. In the sales-commissions episode we find that for the support staff, sharing in the salespeople’s commissions and being thrown a thank-you party are emotionally equivalent. Both heal the emotional rift, but one leaves the salespeople vastly better off.

The Sociopath as Priest

It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are  able to manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms.  The result is that the Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution, and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.

To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while they are being manipulated.

Sociopaths encourage this mode of processing by framing their own contributions to betrayal situations as necessary and inevitable. They also carefully avoid contributing to the emotional texture of unfolding events, otherwise their roles might come under scrutiny by being included in the emotional computations.

For theatrically skilled Sociopaths, other non-vanilla affects are possible. “Divine anger” (Jan),  ”charming but firm elder” (Jo Bennett) and “unpredictable demigod” (Robert California) are examples. These framing affects are designed to shape outcomes without direct participation, in ways that cannot be achieved by neutral low-reactor affects.
***

These non-vanilla personalities operate by adding to, or subtracting from, the net emotional energy available to go around in Loser emotional calculations, but without intimate involvement. Sociopaths basically create the emotional boundary conditions of Loser life in simple or complex ways, depending on their skill level.
***
Guilt is the one emotion that Losers cannot always resolve for themselves, since it sometimes requires quantities of forgiveness that mere humans cannot dispense, but priests can, as reserve bankers of the fiat currencies of Loser emotional life.

Other good nuggets:

  • manufacturing fake realities is very hard. But subtractive simplification of reality is much easier, and yields just as much power.
  • Sociopaths exercise agency on behalf of others. They do not grab power. Power is simply ceded to them.
  • Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.  Social realities exist as a hierarchy of increasingly sophisticated and specialized fictions for those predisposed to believe that there is something special about the human condition, which sets our realities apart from the rest of the universe.
  • There is, to the Sociopath, only one reality governing everything from quarks to galaxies. Humans have no special place within it. Any idea predicated on the special status of the human — such as justice, fairness, equality, talent — is raw material for a theater of mediated realities 
  • Non-Sociopaths dimly recognize the nature of the free Sociopath world through their own categories: “moral hazard” and “principal-agent problem.”  They vaguely sense that the realities being presented to them are bullshit: things said by people who are not lying so much as indifferent to whether or not they are telling the truth. Sociopath freedom of speech is the freedom to bullshit: they are bullshit artists in the truest sense of the phrase.
  • Non-Sociopaths, as Jack Nicholson correctly argued, really cannot handle the truth. . . . The truth of values as crayons in the pockets of unsupervised Sociopaths. The truth of the non-centrality of humans in the larger scheme of things.
  • When these truths are recognized, internalized and turned into default ways of seeing the world, creative-destruction becomes merely the act of living free, not a divinely ordained imperative or a primal urge.  Creative destruction is not a script, but the absence of scripts. The freedom of Sociopaths is the same as the freedom of non-human animals. Those who view it as base merely provide yet another opportunity for Sociopaths to create non-base fictions for them to inhabit.
  • Morality becomes a matter of expressing fundamental dispositions rather than respecting social values. Kindness or cruelty, freely expressed. Those who are amused by suffering use their powers to cause it. Those who enjoy watching happiness theaters, create them through detached benevolence.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Famous sociopaths: Wernher von Braun

Nazi or opportunist? A reader sent me this video on top rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, widely credited for getting the U.S. to the moon, but at what cost? The reader writes:

skip to 1:29 in --

Charming, clever guy who did what it took to make his dream comes true.  A bit like Steve Jobs.



The video has a charming impression from one of von Braun's contemporaries about what his personality was like: "Here was the man who had created those bombs. He attacked my house. I was not a friend of his. Right from the start I had to resist becoming a close friend of his because he was charming. He could charm the pants off anyone and he was a very clever man. You knew that right away. I had tremendous arguments with him because he maintained that he was only a scientist, that he was not a Nazi and I said, 'That's nonsense, you belonged to the Nazi party.'" Apparently President Eisenhower was one of the few that did not succumb to von Braun's charms, but that did not stop von Braun from manipulating the U.S. Congress to fully fund his space/moon pursuits by preying on the public's fears of the Russian threat.

Chameleon, liar, non-political opportunist? Either way, it's an interesting example of someone who was able to navigate the politics, the mob sentiment (both Nazi Germany and the cold war) and manage to manipulate people who could not understand the importance of his work by using that age old tactic -- playing upon peoples' fears.

If he was a sociopath, would he qualify as a "good" or a "evil" one?

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Seeing the good in the bad

I liked this reader comment on what it was like to be the victim of "ruining":

Calm down on the ruining part. My worldview was totally twisted two years ago by a socioblabath. After the initial shock I was recovering for months. I that I could never experience joy again. In my following psychological quest for answers I became aware of things I was obnoxious to before. Before the path crossed my yellow brick road, my main concern were my looks. I made myself up before an exam as if I was going to Fashion Week. Histrionic. Promiscuous. Superficial. Attention-craving. Self-centered. The only thing I like about my former self that I, even then, felt happiest when making others feel good about themselves and their lives. But I was so busy trying to be a Kim Kardashian, that I hardly took the time to do so. At 24 I was behaving like a deluded child. Then I was hypnotized and drained by that 'thing'. In hindsight, what really broke my heart is that I failed to charm him. I thought I was a bonus in his life. I thought he was lucky to have me be infatuated by him. But the only time he felt good with me was in the end. When I looked at him in pure shock for witnessing the manifestation of evil. You could tell he loved that. And now, two years later? I appreciate my friends and family as never before, I hardly wear make up and it looks like I'm graduating cum laude for my masters. Instead of plotting my new headtwirling look, I'm busy helping my retired neighbours get money from their insurance company for their sinking floor. What I'm trying to say is: because of that asshole I realized I was heading in the wrong direction. Ruined? 

Another along similar lines:

I second this. My life too was enhanced by a psychopath. At first I thought he was my ideal man - tall, dark, handsome, rich and charming. I soon found out he was a self-obsessed user. These days I know a thing or two about evaluating a person's character quickly.

I am happier and more joyful than I have ever been because I learned first-hand that all that glisters is not gold. I have re-aligned my values and my life is richer. Plus I can spot an asshole at a thousand paces. Wealth per se no longer impresses me. It's all been quite freeing. I wish I'd met him sooner.

And a sociopath's appreciation of being called out:

Having someone else call you out on your bullshit is beautiful too. The beauty lies in the display of ability and intelligence, whether it's my successful lie or the other person's successful perception of my lie. Seeing someone else be beautiful does not diminish my appreciation of its beauty.

Friday, September 27, 2013

Conscientiousness

I thought this was an interesting sentiment that supported a concept that I have long found helpful in terms of directing your behavior for both sociopaths and non -- imagining the effects of your behavior on your future self.

The tendency to live in the here and now, and the failure to think through the delayed consequences of behavior, is one of the strongest individual-level correlates of delinquency. We tested the hypothesis that this correlation results from a limited ability to imagine one’s self in the future, which leads to opting for immediate gratification. Strengthening the vividness of the future self should therefore reduce involvement in delinquency. We tested and found support for this hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, compared with participants in a control condition, those who wrote a letter to their future self were less inclined to make delinquent choices. In Study 2, participants who interacted with a realistic digital version of their future, age-progressed self in a virtual environment were less likely than control participants to cheat on a subsequent task.

This supports sociopath researcher Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt's assertion that the main personality trait separating successful sociopaths from the less functioning ones is conscientiousness, or an awareness of and distaste for unpleasant future consequences. In other words, a dynamic version of a cost-benefit analysis. As one sociopathic reader described it:

the only reason i don't act upon my urges is the knowledge of reprisal. i don't necessarily fear consequence; i simply acknowledge it as being more inconvenient than some short-lived gratification. as a matter of fact, the inconvenience of consequences is the only thing that holds me back from my desires. the wants themselves run the gamut of importance... sleeping with a woman who isn't my wife is not ethically or socially objectionable to me. overall, the impact on the world because of 'cheating' is incredibly minimal. the risk-analysis of temporary physical enjoyment Vs long-term stability is more effective in decision making than any kind of ethics. refusing to slow down at an intersection, when i have the right-of-way and someone pulls out in front of me, is not ethically or socially objectionable to me. however, going to jail and being locked in a cage seems especially repugnant- not to mention the hassle of repairing my vehicle.
Join Amazon Prime - Watch Over 40,000 Movies

.

Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.