Wednesday, October 16, 2013

A story of exploits: love and marriage (part 2)

I replied:

I guess your wife is right, there are always "other" ways to go about doing things. I don't know if I would say "better," I actually think that what you did was masterful. If your wife is giving you a hard time about it, maybe spin it off as saying, "Look, this is just proof that I would honestly do anything for you. I know you're not planning on coming home with dead bodies in your trunk anytime soon, but I want you to know that if you did, I would be ok with it."

What do you think?

He said:
Since that incident my wife has come to terms with what I am.. or rather, what I am not. Someone who actually cares about the people around us, I say "us" because I do care about my wife.
She knows I don't process emotion "normally". I do love my wife, she knows the way I love is different from say, how her parents love each other or how the couple down the hall way loves each other. She seems to be ok with that kind of love because on the surface where everyone can see it, its the same.

Who's to say that a love fraught with logic and reasoning isn't just as good as what everyone else "feels" ? or whether or not its the same ? Maybe I process the "emotion" on a conscious level where in they process it subconsciously. I know what love is and how you're meant to act when you love someone I just don't "feel" love, for anyone. My wife is smart, attractive and very quick witted she serves a purpose, a barrier, she keeps me happy physically and together we are very fortunate financially, she makes me laugh and she "gets" me, up until that "incident" she had always understood me and made allowances for how I acted, the "incident" as we call it in our home was the first time she knew what I did was conscious thought not instinct which is what scared her I think, but now she has come to terms with that and is dare I say "impressed" with me.

I don't know though I do feel a niggling, like maybe she should be with someone who LOVES her in the true sense of the word. She is younger then me, and so much like me it's not funny, here's hoping she is either more like me then I know or learns to be like me maybe then I wont "feel" bad about keeping her.

I realize I rambled off the subject but though maybe you could use it for another topic ? Who is to say "we" as sociopaths are wrong in not feeling emotions as opposed to using logic and reasoning for a substitute?

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A story of exploits: love and marriage (part 1)

Here is a fun story from a reader about his recent exploits:

Dear M.E,
I would like your view point on something that's recently happened on my side of the cage.

I have a "friend" of a friend of mine who on his bucks night decided to get a stripper, now that seems like the norm, not something I'm personally interested in, Anyways back to the story. On his bucks night after the stripper came to his house we moved on to the city to have a few more drinks and to see where the night took us, we ended up at another strip club....fun.

The groom to be proceeded to have coitis with said stripper. I said nothing I like to keep "information" because you never know.

From the strip club to another club we see my wife and her friends dancing away we meet up and have a drink together my wife and I go outside to chat and be "married" we come back in my buck/groom to be is gone, I ask around about the groom and he is said to be in the toilet with none other then my wife's friend, they are making woopie (cute term for what was actually going on). Once again I keep this to myself. We go to the wedding they wed they buy a new house its all happy days, till recently they wronged myself and my wife, I wont say how or why but none the less wronged. I put into action my plan.

THE PLAN - by ME(not you me)
Step 1.
Don't let them know I'm upset, I like acting so this will be easy. Have lots of conversations about "adultery, cheating, infidelity". She is a paranoid person in general so making her think about these subjects will be easy as well.

Once these subjects take root in her mind we play the waiting game, I wait till Valentine's Day. I send her a bunch of flowers to the school she works at, then within the flowers is a note "your husband has committed adultery play the game and try and find out WHEN!"
My thoughts on this were as follows.
Flowers in front of her kids and fellow workers = Happy
+
Note that brings up a lot of topics shes already paranoid about = Sad
=
Confused

Happy + sad = Confused

Confused people make for an easy target, she will inevitably seek out someone to talk to about these "thoughts" she has been having, cue me, I can be very nice and helpful on hard to talk about subjects.
I will lead her to the "right" conclusion.

They had a BIG fight he admits something happened she forgives him we are all happy friends again.

One year passes, they get pregnant. time for step 2.

Step 2.
Month 1 and 2 - I have a new phone to play with, I start sending him random messages saying how I enjoyed myself so much with him.
He did as I thought played them off as a wrong number.

Month 3 and 4 - while around for barbeques and fun activities I started putting perfume into the air conditioner in their room. My wife has a great selection of perfumes she really has good taste I always compliment her on it.

Month 5 and 6 - myself and a mate start showing up every Friday night and Saturday night and taking him out with out making plans she comes home to an empty house, we take him to a strip club so he doesn't want to tell his wife where he has been, I tell him not to say anything because I don't wont my wife to know either, being as though he has already been in trouble with strippers we wouldn't want them to break up. She starts freaking out, but it seemed like she didn't want to say anything because of the baby.

Month 8 - I find some of my wife's lingerie and... well leave evidence on it.....I leave it in his Ute, wait a little to let it dry out etc. I start with the phone calls again and the messages. I send a note written in a woman's handwriting with the same perfume from month 3 and 4. I love how subtle a smell can be but how much power it can have at the same time its very exhilarating, the note says sorry. I send him another text that says I'm sorry I had to tell your wife I couldn't be the mistress anymore and that I accidently left some lingerie in his Ute.... his wife reads it and finds the lingerie - game over for them, they get divorced and she now has a baby by herself and they sell the house and are no longer happy. I win.


My wife has found out about this... from me, I think I wanted someone to know what I did maybe get some credit, but alas she is very.... upset that I have done something like this....I don't know I don't think I'm a sociopath in the basic sense of the word more so I just don't like being fucked over...anyways, what I was wondering is reading that do you think could I of approached it in any other way ? maybe a way that would get me in less trouble... I don't know.

Cheers.
some other me.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Knowing you better than you know yourself

I saw this in a recent comment: "How could someone who feels no empathy for others possibly understand how to treat a child?"

It reminded me of something that one of my professors said once in the mid 2000s. He said that sometimes he would be in a bookstore, see a book he wanted to buy, but would put off buying it until he got home and could order it on Amazon. Why? Not because he wanted to get it for cheaper, but because he wanted Amazon to know about the purchase so it would be better at recommending books to him in the future. When I watch Netflix, I look at their recommendations for me, and their "star" ratings guess for how much I would like a particular film/television show. They're pretty accurate. And it doesn't take that many data points to pick you out from an otherwise anonymized list of a half million other Netflix subscribers. It's crazy. It turns out that we really all are special little snowflakes.

Has this never happened to you? That someone knew better than you what you would like? Is it empathy that helps them do it? Probably not, right? Because isn't empathy allegedly the ability to feel what another person is feeling? Does Netflix feel what I feel? Not likely, right? But Netflix still does a great job predicting what people want to watch. If I collect a bunch of data points on you, or a child, or your dog, or anything else, will I also understand how you would like to be treated? Will I know perhaps even better than you know yourself? My loved ones feel this way about me.

Maybe you're not the type of person who would go home to order a book on Amazon rather than buy it in the store (or one of the people making up the statistic that 75% of Netflix streaming selections come from recommendations from the site), but there are plenty of people who would value that unique service quite highly. This is particularly true of children who often have their true feelings and wants/needs superseded and/or ignored by the adults in their lives. And by the way, can empaths really understand what/how children think/feel? Unless they have a lot of time recently around people in that age, I have found that most adults are pretty bad at understanding or even caring about how kids feel.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Mob mentality

This was another interesting column in the New York Times about the history, origins, and power of fear + mob mentality in the U.S. Normal people sometimes don't like sociopaths because they don't like feeling that they are just a patsy to the sociopath's intrigues. They are hyper focused on thinking that the sociopath is the root to their problems. It may or may not be true that sociopaths are to blame for as many problems for which they are blamed. Historically, however, it is this fear, suspicion, and hate of "others" that not only perpetuates negative stereotypes to the utter disregard of reality, but leaves people open to be a further patsy to those who would capitalize off of their fear. These opportunists may include political or religious leaders, bosses and neighbors, and anyone else that would use your fear to drive their own ascension to power, or even turn other people's fears against you. Here are excerpts from the column:

A radio interviewer asked me the other day if I thought bigotry was the only reason why someone might oppose the Islamic center in Lower Manhattan. No, I don’t. Most of the opponents aren’t bigots but well-meaning worriers — and during earlier waves of intolerance in American history, it was just the same.

Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.

Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of Glenn Beck.

Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assaults were possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.
***
Historically, unreal suspicions were sometimes rooted in genuine and significant differences. Many new Catholic immigrants lacked experience in democracy. Mormons were engaged in polygamy. And today some extremist Muslims do plot to blow up planes, and Islam has real problems to work out about the rights of women. The pattern has been for demagogues to take real abuses and exaggerate them, portraying, for example, the most venal wing of the Catholic Church as representative of all Catholicism — just as fundamentalist Wahabis today are caricatured as more representative of Islam than the incomparably more numerous moderate Muslims of Indonesia (who have elected a woman as president before Americans have).

During World War I, rumors spread that German-Americans were poisoning food, and Theodore Roosevelt warned that “Germanized socialists” were “more mischievous than bubonic plague.”

Anti-Semitic screeds regularly warned that Jews were plotting to destroy the United States in one way or another. A 1940 survey found that 17 percent of Americans considered Jews to be a “menace to America.”

Chinese in America were denounced, persecuted and lynched, while the head of a United States government commission publicly urged in 1945 "the extermination of the Japanese in toto." Most shamefully, anti-Asian racism led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

All that is part of America’s heritage, and typically as each group has assimilated, it has participated in the torment of newer arrivals — as in Father Charles Coughlin’s ferociously anti-Semitic radio broadcasts in the 1930s. Today’s recrudescence is the lies about President Obama’s faith, and the fear-mongering about the proposed Islamic center.

But we have a more glorious tradition intertwined in American history as well, one of tolerance, amity and religious freedom. Each time, this has ultimately prevailed over the Know Nothing impulse.

Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.
This is why I am anxious in crowds. This is why I am a libertarian. I think I have a healthy fear of persecution that helps constrain any inclination to persecute others. Similarly, I wouldn't mind if the tables were turned on some of those people who are so sure that they know what's right and best for everyone. Maybe if they were on the receiving end of persecution themselves, they wouldn't be so self-satisfied. But I am glad that with the prohibitions on women wearing face veils in France, protests against a Muslim community center in New York, etc., people who would normally consider themselves open minded, inherently "good" and "wise" individuals with clear definitions of "right" and "wrong" are being faced to stare down the barrel of reality.

I smell change.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Successful sociopaths

There has been some interesting research on successful sociopaths by, among others, Dr Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt, who gets interviewed by the BBC here. Here findings are summarized and referenced here:
Unfortunately, very little is known about successful psychopaths. This is because most of the psychological research conducted on psychopathic tendencies has been done on psychopaths who are incarcerated. For instance, Kent Kiehl has done some interesting research using fMRIs to examine the brains of incarcerated psychopaths. His research shows that such individuals suffer from significant impairments that affect their ability to detect emotions in others and to feel emotions themselves.

But what makes a successful psychopath different than an unsuccessful or "prototypic" psychopath? My colleague, Dr. Stephanie Mullins-Sweatt, recently examined this idea in an article just published in the Journal of Research in Personality. Dr. Mullins-Sweatt, along with her coauthors, asked experts in the areas of psychology and law to describe an individual they knew personally who matched the description I gave above regarding a successful psychopath. These experts were then asked to rate this individual on a variety of personality characteristics. From these responses, a clear, consistent description emerged that matched the typical characteristics of a prototypic psychopath in all ways but one: Conscientiousness.

In the personality literature, conscientiousness refers to the tendency to show self-discipline, the act dutifully, and to aim for achievement. People high in conscientiousness prefer planned, rather than spontaneous, behavior and are able to effectively control and regulate their impulses. Prototypic psychopaths are quite low in this trait, unable to put the brakes on their dangerous impulses and incapable of learning from their mistakes. Given this, it is no surprise that such individuals are often arrested and convicted for their heinous crimes. However, the personality ratings of the successful psychopaths depicted a dishonest, arrogant, exploitative person who nevertheless was able to keep their behavior in check by controlling their destructive impulses and preventing detection.
I take issue with the way "prototypic" psychopaths are described here. People have been aware of the existence of sociopaths for millenia, across many cultures. The common conception of the ne'er-do-well violent criminal sociopath has been around for only the past century or so. That sociopaths have survived (and thrived) this long suggests that the sociopaths who are capable of putting the brakes on their dangerous impulses and showing a certain level of self discipline are the prototypical sociopaths, not the ones rotting away in prison.
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