Approval vs. power

A reader wonders why people do the things they do and how that affects the relationships they form:

It’s like there are 2 ways to be with people

1. Approval seeking
2. Power seeking

We are a mix of those 2 to different degrees with everyone we interact with, which is exactly why we’re different depending on who we’re talking to . It's usually all subconscious, it’s like our personalities form hierarchies everywhere.

1. Does a lot of stupid things for approval, and has since the dawn of time. Like the things people did for kings and god and people that stay in relationships that aren't any good for them, hazing, the desire to be in the ‘inner circle’ regardless of how bad it is. It explains people like Snooki. These people let others mold them. This also explains the existence of the all-forgiving, all-accepting powerful paternal father figure also known as god in most cultures, people create someone that gives them approval whenever they want, and I think people need it to be happy and to function, like sort of a feedback that they’re valuable people.

Also 1 seems to be stereotypical woman behavior and 2 seems to be stereotypical guy behavior, they seem gender related but it’s actually only so because (generally) women are more submissive and men are more assertive.

So most emotions seem to come out of interactions with 1. and 2. These are extreme examples, but people mix and match these and things come out more balanced.

Like
1-1: to equal degrees is where true bonds form, like real friendship and love.  But the problem is that people have to make themselves slightly vulnerable and easy to take advantage of for this dynamic to work. This is where functional families are too, regardless of who they are they get down or up on each others levels and reciprocate. Reciprocation is the best way to have 1-1 and it works with uneven playing fields.

1->2: the 1 will feel like the 2 is emotionally unavailable, distant, they will get clingy onto them, which will reinforce 2’s behavior and drive them further away. This is why most guys are all like ‘bitches be crazy’. They don’t understand that it’s a normal response to neglect. The 1 will wrongfully take this personally, and think there is something wrong with them. They will want to re-balance things but will usually go about it the wrong way. The irony is the harder they try, the more they'll be a nuisance.

2->1: 2 will experience boredom with 1, so they’ll either end the relationship, enjoy the attention, or reduce 1 to more and more of a functional role. Which is why most girls are like ‘guys are assholes’. 

So say 1 gets reduced to more and more of a functional role, the gap between 1 and 2 widens. There’s obviously a sub/dom thing going on, but at a certain point, sub/dom turns into inferior/superior in the mind of the dom, this can also happen if people are told they’re more worthy than others,and if they believe it. They start to build their self-worth on that concept that that’s when things unhinge because for them to feel worthy, they need to keep that dynamic in place. If 1 tries to reassert themselves, 2 will resent that [like with all the hateful comments on yt when porn stars try to conduct a normal interview, proving that they have a brain] and crack down further. This may be because the animal brain finally gets engaged, and that part deals with dominance, hatred and lust. That exact thinking pattern is present in racism, lust, treatment of POWs, in domestic abuse, murders, gang members, bullying, it explains why those hot-headed middle easterners are so angry at everyone that’s female or not of their religion, why some people have authoritative personalities, why bosses can be intolerable. They’re all equally as bad. There’s also a study that proves that people like to exert more and more dominance over people that allow them over time, not out of malice but out of a want to control, and they sort of gain joy out of that process. The people that do this in a way that's not considered socially acceptable are the sociopaths. Pure 2.

So why do people do this if it’s bad? Complete dominance over someone is euphoric, seriously, it feels amazing in a twisted kind of way. It induces guilt and regret for a regular person, but sometimes the (empath) 2s come up with ways to circumvent that and allow them to act that way at will, to their benefit. These excuses make no actual sense, but if they’re socially supported that’s all that matters (screw logic if we can feel good about ourselves is a stance people love to take, case in point: religion). These excuses are : She/he’s black, she’s a whore she/he’s a communist, she/he’s dumb, she/he is an enemy of god and in the way of my blissful afterlife where 7 virgins will cater to all my needs. In this way, they can relish in the fact that they think they're better than at least one person, the ego boost that it gives them, and can partake in the illusion that it actually means something.

2-2: Could be bad, like wars and armed standoffs. But could also result in competition, which is what pushes thing forward the fastest. Competitions don’t always endanger lives and they’re not always about interpersonal relationships so they're not always destructive.

I've learned not to be angry despite this, it’s not really peoples fault that they are SOO easily manipulated by their context, I mean it is but it's clearly not an individual problem since it's so widespread, it's more like the wiring. It seems that it’s just  what happened to their brains after experiences, outcomes, and places where social reinforcement was applied. It makes a ton of evolutionary sense, not actual sense, and that can only work if people see things through a self-serving perspective. 

Fear leads to anger

This is an interesting quote from the movie "A Single Man." In the movie it refers to the gay population, but I think it works equally well for any persecuted minority, whether an ethnic minority in Africa targeted for genocide, or people whose minds work a little bit differently. I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but it's not much of one.

The Nazis were obviously wrong to hate the Jews. But their hating the Jews was not without a cause… But the cause wasnʼt real. The cause was imagined. The cause was FEAR.

Letʼs leave the Jews out of this for a moment and think of another minority. One that can go unnoticed if it needs to.

There are all sorts of minorities, blondes for example, but a minority is only thought of as one when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority. A real threat or an imagined one. And therein lies the FEAR. And, if the minority is somehow invisible……the fear is even greater. And this FEAR is the reason the minority is persecuted. So, there always is a cause. And the cause is FEAR. Minorities are just people. People……like us.

Fear, after all, is our real enemy. Fear is taking over our world. Fear is being used as a tool of manipulation in our society. Itʼs how politicians peddle policy and how Madison Avenue sells us things that we donʼt need. Think about it. Fear that weʼre going to be attacked, fear that there are communists lurking around every corner, fear that some little Caribbean country that doesnʼt believe in our way of life poses a threat to us. Fear that black culture may take over the world. Fear of Elvis Presleyʼs hips.Well, maybe that one is a real fear. Fear that our bad breath might ruin our friendships… Fear of growing old and being alone. A fear that we’re useless and no one cares what we have to say.

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?

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.

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?