Friday, November 7, 2014

Love thy enemy

I liked this quote from Ender's Game:

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them –"

"You beat them." For a moment she was not afraid of his understanding.

"No, you don't understand. I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again. I grind them and grind them until they don't exist."

Thursday, November 6, 2014

My real shape is change

From a reader:

Dear M.E.

While torching my life for like the fifth time, just to enjoy watching it burn to the ground, I kind of started asking to myself ¿Why I do this? ¿What am I?. I peeled layer after layer of lies, that I often tell to myself and believe it, and, in the end, where I expected to find something, there was nothing that I could grasp.
And at this point I had this dream. A high tech company trying to hire me for obscure reasons. It turns out that they have this alien being imprisoned in a fortress building from whom they have been extracting advanced technology. They take me to the core of this bunker, and there it is, an unknown naked woman inside a sort of incubator. I approach it, and suddenly it is no more an unknown woman, but my dead girl of years ago. Ok. I think, this is some kind of a telepathic metamorph that is trying to mess with my emotions, but it's not gonna work, and I realize why they want me to meet this being, because I am a sociopathic scientist, immune to its power of manipulation. We sustain a dialog that I don't remember, but at some point I ask it ¿what is your real shape? The alien looks at me with an expression as not understanding the question, but suddenly its face lights and, with a smile, it tells me "my real shape is change".

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

On tolerance

I thought this was an interesting Malcolm Gladwell quote on tolerance:

What we call tolerance in this country, and pat ourselves on the back for, is the lamest kind of tolerance. What we call tolerance in this country is when people who are unlike us want to be like us, and when we decide to accept someone who is not like us and wants to be like us, we pat ourselves on the back… So when gays want to be like us and get married, we finally get around and say, “Oh, isn’t that courageous of me, to accept gay people for finally wanting to be like us.”

Sorry — you don’t get points for accepting someone who wants to be just like you. You get points for accepting someone who doesn’t want to be like you — that’s where the difficulty lies.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Secret identity

I'm trying something new. For the past couple months or so I've been back in hiding. This is different than what I have been doing for the past decade or so, which is to be relatively open with people. If I haven't used the actual word sociopath (except for family and just a handful of others), I've been pretty out about what type of person I am. I would read quotes like this and think, yeah, I want to live this way:
The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.
-- E. V. Lucas
See, I had a history of self-deception. And I was always worried that I would backslide into that self-deception and become like a fool narcissist, whom I just personally cannot stand. So in part because I realized how easy it is to lie to myself, and in part because I was so self-assured I enjoyed telling people what I was and still being able to mess with them, I was largely transparent. Of course that doesn't mean I never lied -- I would doubletalk my tongue out. I would never volunteer information, would spin story after story just to see what I would get away with. But sometimes, maybe if someone had figured things out or just so I could get away with more bad behavior, I would sometimes come clean.

I just don't believe it anymore. I used to always think that I would eventually tell people that were close to me. Now I think -- what's the point? If they aren't an idiot, they'll pretty much know who I am without me telling them or giving them the keywords to punch into Google. If they are an idiot, then it wouldn't really help to tell them anything anyway.

There's basically no upside to telling people now that I'm not worried as much about self deception (I have you all to keep me honest with myself) and I don't care as much about "proving" myself, to myself or to others. Call it laziness, or agedness, or shadiness, but that's where I'm at.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Karma and dismissals

I feel like I'm experiencing a bit of karmic whiplash. I myself have been having to deal with someone with a personality on a daily basis, even being responsible for this person's welfare to a certain extent.  Let's call her Lola. I feel like I am getting more of an understanding of why people hate sociopaths so much. I kind of understand the source of the feeling behind comments like "Even if inherited..THEY KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG." Because the thing is that it is quite apparent that Lola knows right and wrong. To a certain extent she understands cause and effect -- drive under certain conditions and you will lose your license, fail to file a tax return and you will get audited. But she keeps doing these things. The next year she fails to file a tax return or the next month she is getting pulled over again and fighting to keep her license again.

Other family members have given up -- "if she wants help, she needs to learn to help herself." And the thing is all of these things are true, and she is low functioning. But the low functioning causes the behavior to be so bad, rather than the the behavior causing her to be low functioning. Even if it seems like she knows right and wrong and seems to be acting with free will and making wrong choices, it's more like when a pet dog is naughty and gets in the trash even though he knows he shouldn't rather than a normal personal with all of his faculties knowing right and just choosing wrong. But this is incredibly hard to understand, even for me. She says things like, "I don't want you telling people I have a disorder because then they will blame things on the disorder." Ok. But you do have a disorder. And they most likely will be quite correct in blaming things you say or do on the disorder. I don't really understand (because it is not in my personal experience) how can someone both be sort of ok in admitting that they have a disorder, but then in denial that the disorder is actually affecting their emotions and behavior and that they aren't 100% the captain of their destiny. But that dual belief is also part of the disorder.

In some ways I am one of the best positioned people to deal with her because I have my own experiences of knowing that I am expected to act or think or feel a certain way but never being able to close that gap between expectations and reality, not for lack of trying. And I have been thinking a lot about the idea of how it is very difficult for us to believe something that we have not experienced ourselves, particularly if it seems so far outside of our experience. Some people will admit that there are things that exist even though they don't understand how they could. Others are more prone to tidy dismissals. I thought of this in reading this quote from Jeanette Winterson:

The fashion for dismissing a thing out of ignorance is vicious. In fact, it is not essential to like a thing in order to recognize its worth, but to reach that point of self-awareness and sophistication takes years of perseverance.
***
An examination of our own feelings will have to give way to an examination of the piece of work. This is fair to the work and it will help to clarify the nature of our own feelings; to reveal prejudice, opinion, anxiety, even the mood of the day. It is right to trust our feelings but right to test them too. If they are what we say they are, they will stand the test, if not, we will at least be less insincere.

She's talking about understanding art, but I think her thoughts have interesting parallels to dismissing anything out of ignorance:

When you say “This work has nothing to do with me.” When you say “This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/élitist etc.,” you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the “I” that we are.

A love-parallel would be just; falling in love challenges the reality to which we lay claim, part of the pleasure of love and part of its terror, is the world turned upside down. We want and we don’t want, the cutting edge, the upset, the new views. Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We already have tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?

[...]

The solid presence of art demands from us significant effort, an effort anathema to popular culture. Effort of time, effort of money, effort of study, effort of humility, effort of imagination have each been packed by the artist into the art. 
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