Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Camus on Candyland

I thought this was an interesting sort of follow up to yesterday's post, from Existential Comics (with the bigger, more readable version here):




Monday, December 15, 2014

Survival of the fittest

Sociopaths have a reputation for thinking that they're better than everyone else. Not true (or at least I don't think it is, I don't know a sufficient sample size of sociopaths). Even if it's "true-ish", I believe that it's much more nuanced than that. Sociopaths do suffer from delusions of grandeur, yes, but they're not necessarily a comparative delusion of "I'm better than you" so much as "aren't I great?" or even the slightly more comparative but still within a narrow niche of applicability "nobody could have pulled that off like I just did." Second, it's not a thought so much as it is a feeling of self-love and admiration. When it comes to a sociopath's actual thoughts, sociopaths, at least the grown-up mature ones, understand well that everybody is about the same in terms of meaninglessness in the grand scheme of things. It's perhaps what makes utilitarian thinking so natural and easy.

Third, and the focus of this post, I think that a lot of people might naturally believe that a sociopath needs feelings of superiority in order to justify his behavior or self-love. Also not true. In order for empaths to be cold and cruel, they often need to lean on their pseudo-science understanding concepts of "survival of the fittest" or as one commenter recently wondered "trample or be trampled". But sociopaths don't have to logically talk themselves into this sort of behavior the same way that no one has to logically talk anyone into falling in love with their newborn. That's just the way sociopaths are wired. And there is no real logic to this sort of bastardization of "survival of the fittest" way of thinking. Nature is not some hardwired meritocracy that values objectively "superior" traits over "inferior" ones. Your worth is almost entirely contextual and based on scarcity and demand at that particular moment. If you're the only electrician in the world, you'll be a king. If everyone is an electrician, you are nothing. If you're one of the few in the world who can flawlessly sing high C's, you're an opera star. If everyone could, you're nothing. Society is in constant state of flux in terms of what is values and what it needs. The most we could say is that for a particular problem or feat, you also could be the "only one who could pull this off". Forgive the oversimplification, but all Darwinism says is that the more diverse a species is, the more robustly it encounters external opposition or change. It's as if we all drew from the genetic lottery and we have no idea what the truly "winning" ticket will be until nature and chance draws it (and keeps drawing it from day to day). Sociopaths win at different things than normal people only because their lottery ticket has different numbers and due to their relative scarcity. Nobody has a clue who will survive until it happens, so it's pretty foolish to make an assertions about people being "worthy" to survive or not.

I also liked this recent comment responding to the trample or be trampled question:

I knew a guy at university who was so insecure and trying to look clever and tough, he went on and on at a party, where people were tripping, about 'the law of the jungle' and 'survival of the fittest'. People were coming out of the room dazed and worried because they were almost convinced that it was therefore OK to kill him because he was irritating them. I had to talk them down because even though I used to be a nice person, I agreed this guy needed to be removed from the gene pool, but lets leave that to the decision of the insecure fat girls he was always creeping on to. 

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Compartmentalizing

A reader asked me how a sociopath could seemingly feel one way about something one day and feel something entirely inconsistent another day. I responded:

Sociopaths seem to be exceptionally good at compartmentalizing, which would explain why it is possible for him both to have cared (and perhaps still care) for you very much but seem to not be at all interested in you now. A good way for normal people to understand the extent to which this works is to think of a vivid dream, perhaps an anxiety dream in which you dream of things that need to happen, projects that need to get done, problems that need to get solved. During the dream you get very caught up in the urgency of things, whatever it is that you are dreaming about becomes very important to you, you can't imagine a world in which this was not a primary concern for you. When you wake up from the dream there are still lingering feelings of the dream. Perhaps you just have the feeling that you need to do something, or maybe you actually remember specifics of what you supposedly "need" to do. Within the first fifteen minutes or so of wakefulness, however, you eventually realize that it was just a dream, that you really don't have to worry about those things at all, and so you continue living this other life and quickly forget about the dream life. That is how much sociopaths can compartmentalize. The dream world never fully goes away, maybe they remember some of it, or something will remind them of it, but for the most part it and the feelings felt are a faint memory. Those feelings associated were "real" in that they reflect how the sociopath would feel under the circumstances of the dream, but those circumstances just turned out not to be true.

I wonder whether the mechanism of compartmentalizing for the sociopath is the same as the mechanism that allows people with multiple personality disorder to have separate personalities each living essentially independent lives, sometimes unaware of each other.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Who wants to be a sociopath?

From a reader:

I'm going to ask you the most common question you must surely be asked, Am I a sociopath? I am fourteen years old and female and have researched many possibilities for what was clearly an emotional development problem since I was about ten years old.

 When I was ten I came up with the theory that my emotions were more detached than other peoples and this made me wary of those who used emotions in decision making processes (i.e. everyone) and began to seek understanding in fictional characters  who seemed to act like me. They were almost all villains which didn't faze me in the least because I have grown up rooting for the evil side in every story.

 Later in life when I had read into this further I decided that I might have social Anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) but again rejected this theory when I thought it through further.

In September/October time 2013 I started looking into psychopaths not in an attempt to diagnose myself but to see if it would apply to the fictional character Yassen Gregorovitch from the Alex Rider series. When I started to read through available material online I kept seeing things that applied to me and eventually thought I'd do some of the many tests online as truthfully as I could and each one told me that I was a psychopath and so I found every old diary entry I could in my desk drawers and even they only backed me up with stuff that is surprisingly indifferent when talking about how I hurt my little sister or how stupid books with morals were.

Ever since I was really young I kept to myself and used all that I knew about other people to keep them away including my family. I don't do affection. I have little attachment to things and I feel as if my life is just one huge mask that I've woven since I was little. I'm quite clever but what appears to be intelligence most of the time is just me finding the easiest way to the answer. I have a good understanding of emotions and how to influence them but I have really rather shallow emotions most of the time but some people really piss me off. I've begun to really hate having to go to church but it's all part of my mask. If I can get away with something without getting caught I will do that but if I can't then I won't.  This all seems to be sociopathic.
The only problem is I have two really close friends that I would and have fiercely defended as fierce as I would myself.

I am writing to you because I saw a post talking about a child developmental stage for a sociopath and it was exactly the same as me and as I don't want to tell my parents of my suspicions (they'd take it badly) and I desperately need to know if someone else agrees with me.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Growing up to be a sociopath?

This was an interesting new comment to an old post, "Sociopath child, to teen, to adult":

It's stunning how accurately this describes my life. I get so frustrated when I hear people say sociopaths are the same person from fetus into adulthood. That sociopaths were heartless, self absorbed little monsters when they were children or they aren't really sociopaths.

But I recall a time of feeling normal and having emotions. Or at least feeling as though I had emotions. Feeling love and crying over things, even if they were actually fake. I don't think sociopathy blossoms until your 20's. It's like a seed of darkness that slowly shallows you as you mature.

My childhood followed the same trend of fitting in to hitting an abrupt wall where I was a weird, socially awkward outcast. Always getting picked on and having a very tight circle of friends, going about life like a dog trying to play piano. It wasn't until my mid to late teens that I started studying psychology and social interaction, picking up books on how to manipulate and pick up women, etc.

Sooner or later I became good at getting what I want (control over men, sex from women). It was then I stumbled upon books about psychopathy, and was slowly starting to manifest all the telltale traits. I'm 27 now, and can't remember the last time I really felt all that much about anything. I think I went through a "mean streak" in my early 20's, but now I'm starting to mellow. I don't feel love, but I don't feel contempt either. 

I think I went through that deep soul searching period to reach this point, and I feel I've done a 180 away from the callous, cynical, reckless ways of the dysfunctional sociopath. I don't feel compassionate, but maybe a little benign. Like the world is undeserving, but I happen to be merciful. I don't see a reason to do harm, so why not try to be civil and let the sheep adore me? 

It was really challenging to write the childhood chapters of the book. I wasn't sure whether to write them in the mindset that I have now about things that I used to think were perfectly normal or innocent (manipulations, certain antisocial behavior, etc.) or whether to write it with the mindset that I had then, with all of the megalomania or delusional thinking that I was heavily subject to until my late teens and early twenties. Like everything with the book, my choice ended up being to basically filter out only the most sociopathic seeming things -- often whatever sounded most sociopathic or interesting to my editor at the time. In a way, doing that unwittingly catered to this idea that we are static individuals -- have always been and acted the same. 

The truth is I don't trust my memories of particularly my early childhood before about 8 or 9 years old. They're too hazy and they seem too dream-like to feel like they really happened to me. Maybe I was more normal than I seemed. Or maybe I was more different than I seemed. I do remember having a sense at the time that I was seemed more ruthless and coldhearted than my peers, but I also have a lot of memories of feeling pretty normal -- upset about regular things that children get upset about and megalomaniacal and selfish but perhaps no more than all children tend to be. I don't know, is it possible to have been normal and feeling emotions and then later grow into a sociopath?
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