Sunday, April 17, 2016

Not sociopath, just smart?

From a reader:

Your blog has resonated with me for a while now. Despite not being a sociopath, getting an intuitive understanding of the illusion of free will can tend to make you more like one. Your recent post sort of illustrated the blind fact that was sitting in front of my face, why I, a fairly normal empathetic person, has no problem with manipulating people, especially if its benign.

When you see all of human desire, behavior and nature as a mechanism, even the most romanticized, idealized sensibilities start to become nothing more than  mechanisms.

At first, this might make someone depressed, as their idealistic illusions of meaning and purpose start to disintegrate. But, another thought can arise - that depression itself, that sense of emptiness, it's just a mechanism too.

Once you get there, you can start plugging into your instincts more rationally. Books like The Art of Seduction and 48 Laws of Power resonate with me. They wouldn't have in the past. My personality has become more Machiavellian, at least in the sense that I am much more keen on evaluating actions in terms of their consequences instead of ideals.

M.E.:

You sound like my friend. She sort of insists that I became the way I became because I was smart and so I naturally saw everything in terms of gears and levers to be manipulated to get what I wanted. I think it's because that's how she feels. She is probably currently in the depression state, because I think you're right, it's hard for meaning to exist at the same time that you are aware that everything can be reduced to simple mechanics. She has taken it a step further than just the belief that everything is simple mechanics, so it's even worse. Since she was a child, she's believed that she is *so* smart and *so* good at manipulating the gears and levers of people and the world that she fears that she controls everything, which because she's an empath, makes her constantly worry that she will mess everything up.

But when she says these things to me, I understand how different I am from her. Because it's not that seeing things in terms of gears and levers as a little kid made me a sociopath, it's being sociopathic made made me see the world in terms of gears and levers. So I never used to worry about things like meaning, because I never had it and then lost it. It was only after I tried to be less sociopathic that the question of meaning became a real issue for me.

Friday, April 15, 2016

Famous sociopaths: Taylor Swift (part 2)

I have never actually said that Taylor Swift is a sociopath,* but she I have said that she is a master of cultivating power. And she has been doing so since she was a teenager. So you draw your own conclusions...

A reader draws hers:

I have spent many hours on your site over the years and find it to be very informative. I was reminded of your page again (for the first time in a little while) after a discussion about Taylor Swift's behavior at last nights "Grammy's."

There is a small but growing number of people out there beginning to believe she is a sociopath. I am one of them. Would you consider doing a post about Miss Swift? I would love to hear your take on this along with any discussion in the comments.

She a complicated woman. She's often described as "calculated" which is a term she hates. Apparently she told Kanye west that she approved of a song lyric he wrote about her, only to to turn around and publicly denounce him and play the victim afterwards (this all went down last month).

I like this article: http://m.riverfronttimes.com/musicblog/2015/09/25/evidence-suggests-taylor-swift-is-a-psychopath because while it's definitely subjective and not objective fact, it does interestingly line up her words and behaviours with sociopath characteristics. Also if you google her interview with GQ magazine you can tell that the reporter throughout the interview seems to recognize these characteristics in her. 

You are definitely right, she's perfected her art! 

*And I wouldn't say anything about her other than that, honestly because she makes me a little nervous. She doesn't seem to have any boundaries as to how low she will go to get into a random fight with some nobody or shame some unsuspecting ordinary-man. She's reminds me a little of Putin in the same sense of seemingly indiscriminate life-ruining and potential for extreme pettiness? 

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

What if sociopaths looked like foxes?

A reader sent me this link to a review of the movie Disney animated movie Zootopia, in which this question is at least impliedly asked:

There’s something inherently weird about the “talking animal” genre, especially once it gets seriously anthropomorphic. What if some people in real life were goats and others were alligators? Would you still feel the same way about crime policy and immigration? It raises all sorts of ugly questions, that don’t have proper answers—because in real life, people aren’t easily labeled as pigs, wolves, geese, or tigers. Art Spiegelman’s Maus pushes this weirdness to its limits, with its Nazi cats and Jewish mice—but he makes it clear these roles are not intrinsic, by showing one of the mice turning into a cat in one panel.

Minor spoilers ahead...

The “talking animal” story is, in some sense, a fantasy both about being able to identify someone’s character at a glance—the wolf is visibly not the same as the three pigs—but also, about people having an essential nature that cannot be changed. (That second aspect of the fantasy also helps explain astrology, personality tests, and a million self-help books that divide people into types.)

I think a lot of people naturally think that sociopaths are essentially a different species -- the foxes of the human world. And I think a lot of people would love to be able to recognize them right away for that. But is that an accurate viewpoint?

Sunday, April 10, 2016

Sociopaths on TV: The Girlfriend Experience

Public service announcement: a tv show about a female lawyer turned high class prostitute premiered today on Starz, with all of the episodes available at once. The character apparently gets described by others as a sociopath, and by the way its described, it definitely seems influenced by a sociopathic worldview. From the Rotten Tomatoes interview:

Rotten Tomatoes: What do you think is the correlation between office politics — or even the legal industry — and something like prostitution? Are you trying to make that comparison? Does the show have a specific point of view?

Seimetz: As dark and sort of moody as the show is, we’re not trying to say that this is bad — that the world is bad. Or good. We’re just sort of showing it and trying to draw conclusions as to how we act as human beings. In general, whether it’s law or business or prostitution, I think most interactions are transactional — whether it’s money or what somebody can do for you or how they make you feel. You want something out of an exchange from a human being in general in your life, right? And I think any business or any sort of part of your life is also about creating boundaries and knowing when a relationship isn’t good or isn’t benefiting you anymore.  Which I think, in the world of escorting, is sort of heightened, because there are these ready-made relationships that you step into and you’re immediately intimate. The expectation is to immediately become intimate with somebody. It’s this sort of heightened — or a much more dense — version of how we operate in society.
***
Rotten Tomatoes: Christine is referred to as a “female Ted Bundy.” She doesn’t seem to like people. Then it makes her question herself. Is she a good person, and what sort of character arcs can we expect from that personality type?

Seimetz: I don’t really know what a good person is. I come from a laundry list of extremely complicated human beings [laughing]. And so there have been moments where they’re not so great and there have been moments when they are wonderful. So I don’t know. I think what’s interesting is her feelings, in general. The conflicts that occur in the show are from the aspects of her personality where she is extremely unapologetic about how she feels. She has a flicker of a moment where she wonders if something is wrong with her — if she’s a sociopath. But that’s only because somebody said that to her. But really she’s like, “You know what? I really don’t care.” And she just keeps going. Most of the conflicts come out of that unapologetic nature of the female character, because in our society — and in television — we don’t see a lot of women who are unapologetic, or are sort of OK with how they are in life, and whether or not that meets everyone’s norm. She’s not struggling to understand herself — she already knows herself. She’s just discovering her superpower, in a way [laughing].
***
Rotten Tomatoes: When do we see the real Christine? Is it when she’s working, or out socially, or alone?


Seimetz: I think that’s up to the viewer to decide. Part of the allure of what we wanted to do from the series is for the viewer to constantly question who the real person is. Whether Christine is herself when she is doing her law stuff or if she is herself when she is with her clients, I don’t think any one personality is that simple. I like to say that I am myself no matter what, but I don’t treat the clerk at the grocery store like I do my mother. I feel like we’re all playing roles every time we make a transaction or every time we are in social settings. Not that we’re all completely changing our point of view, but we are all sort of playing a certain part that participates in whatever is convenient to the situation.

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Paradigm shifts

I hesitate to write about this because it's both probably too personal and too random for anyone to relate to. But I hope there is a more meta thought about changing paradigms and what that actually means that can translate via the too specific story.

Recently, I was out with a sort of former seduction target turned long time friend, who has over the past few years retreated more and more from life. We met up randomly and by chance with a third, a stranger. The night with the third turned into hijinsky fun, the stuff of silly comedies with an undercurrent of sexual energy. The stranger skilfully flirted equally with me and my friend, keeping an amazing balance. Whenever my friend would withdraw, the stranger was there to draw my friend back in. It made me think -- this must be exactly how polyamorous relationships work. I've had multiple relationships going on at the same time, but never the same relationship with multiple people (sad!), so it was fascinating. It made a lot of sense too. Whenever there is a weak relationship between any two of the three, that weak pairing needs to be shored up with one on one connection between those two. And although I wasn't really that interested in either one by themselves, but there was something about the combination that was charming to me -- seeing them through each others' eyes.

The stranger ends up too drunk to drive home, but everyone has a car and everyone is far from home. It came down to a coin flip, but eventually it gets decided that my friend will drive the stranger home and crash there for the night, to come back in the morning to retrieve the third car. Of course they hook up, but I was surprised that they didn't come up for air for several days.

I'm genuinely happy for my friend, because I feel like it's an end of retreating from the world. And my world paradigm told me, "say you're happy for them both and then back away." But then I had this crazy thought just pop in my mind -- if I back away, this relationship will fail. Why? My mind reasoned, as if on its own, based on my observations of what I knew about them (I had tried to set the stranger up with other random strangers that night, so the stranger told me what to look for) there were at least a half a dozen ways in which my friend failed to meet the stranger's expectations. But I did meet those particular criteria. Same for what my friend is looking for -- so many things the stranger failed at, that I happened to meet. And there was also a half dozen ways that I failed to meet what each of them were looking for in ways that they matched for each other, most importantly that I was actually looking for a romantic relationship with either of them.

I had these thoughts in what felt like a moment of clarity for me, like seeing a math problem a different, better way. My mind told me that the optimal thing to do in terms of their relationship wouldn't be to adopt the societal paradigm of don't-be-a-third-wheel paradigm, but to continue to fill each's needs in the way that their new partner couldn't or didn't want to.

Again, you can imagine what happens here. I try to explain this to my friend, just to see if the idea rang true to my friend too. But it sounds too crazy, doesn't it? I mean, clearly I'm just jealous, anyone would think. Another friend told me in an IM conversation re the situation "i think you struggle a lot with things not being about you and it's something to work on." At first I wanted people to understand, wanted to explain how this was not about me this time or about jealousy.* And I did try to explain to my friend, until I realized -- this is my paradigm, and it is the truest I know, but it is not anyone else's. Neither one of them owe you any understanding of your paradigm and they certainly don't owe you adopting yours as their own, even if you believe that your paradigm would benefit them more in this situation.

Because as much as my concept of the self has been flexible, it has traditionally driven me literally crazy when people have denied a truth that seemed so self-evident. I've often fancied myself a sort of Galileo, preaching the truth of my righteous paradigm to the blind who will not see. A defender of truth. But after this recent experience, I understand that the truth is not necessarily always relative, but that in certain circumstances the truth hardly matters. Someone else's beliefs and/or their ability to have their own beliefs matter much more than any attempt at objective truth. And after I had that paradigm shift about third wheels and polyamory so suddenly, I wonder what paradigms of mine are next to shift? Finally, I see that I need to figure out a better way to allow my paradigms to shift in the future without upsetting others who aren't ready/wanting/asking to shift theirs.



*I've never been looking for love. I've never felt like that was true, at least. I've been attracted to people plenty, and I'm certain that I've wished in some way for them to reciprocate the intensity of my feelings, but even that has been oddly not a big deal to me. If it's not a straight seduction in which their passion for me are the "points" I'm scoring in some sort of game with myself, I've always been more into my own feelings for someone I care about than caring exactly how much they care back at me. Maybe this is why I have only experienced very pale shades of jealousy in my life, because what I want most are my own feelings of passion, not someone else's feelings for me. 
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