How Wolves Change Rivers

I'm always surprised at how certain some people are that most of the evil in the world is due to sociopaths and that if we could just eradicate sociopaths, we'd have a much better world.

Obviously, messing with anything has unintended consequences that are often unforeseeable and unpredictable. I thought this video (thanks Ryan Gosling tweet!) was a good example of what this looks like.


And in what sorts of ways might sociopaths be stabilizing the human population? What sorts of ways might we be making things more efficient? Making them more antifragile?

Quote: Conscience

"More important than your obligation to follow your conscience, or at least prior to it, is your obligation to form your conscience correctly."

—Justice Antonin Scalia

Acceptance and healing

From a reader:

Confessions of a Sociopath has changed the way I look at my profession and indeed, the way I look at my life – and I am in the retirement zone! For me, the book is seminal and is an extraordinarily well written piece of work. How can I thank you?

I am an integrative person centred counsellor and absolutely love my work- because people come in miserable and go out smiling. In that role I am a grateful catalyst of health. In some of the exploits of your life, you seem to have been a catalyst of sickness – but I do not blame you. We do not make ourselves. Neither nature nor nurture is in our power.

As a counsellor, I help those whom the psychiatrists have given up on. Everyone can get happier. That is my job. Together, client and I just have to tap into goodness at a deep and spiritual level. Unfortunately, you appear to have been tapping into evil- but it’s not really your fault. You seem to say you love your parents and that they were good to you. They may have intended well. And we all want figures to love. But the way we are treated creates the persons we are, and I can see a lot of damage done in your childhood. From that learning, you went on to hurt others in like manner. And you may find that the reason for this is your parents were also mismanaged. Yes, your DNA will have directed your responses, but children need consistent love and security to become healthy adults and your story tells me otherwise. As such, you may never have seen emotion in the colour I see it. We all have to navigate our emotional selves through lives which include others’ emotions, and if we don’t read them well, we will do a lot of harm. Then we try and get out of the consequences, with more issues. 

I don’t believe that your intelligence, creativity and even gender ambiguity are necessary facets of my view of sociopathy. I see myself as a thought rebel, but I sense and care for others’ feelings well. I have to for my job!  I maintain no-one is a sociopath per se, implying a single shape for which change is impossible. But I do say many people have sociopathic tendencies in varying degrees. And whilst sociopathic people are part of our current society, I don’t believe sociopathy is essential to it- not in my world anyway! Sorry!

My mother is sociopathic and does not know it. She had 4 children and wrecked 5 lives, one terminally. I have spent all my life rebuilding unstable foundations to the point where I believe that my brain is rewired. Now, life just gets better and better.

Your religion showed you how to become accepted in society, but I do not see any real ‘born again’ people on your book, except possibly Ann, whether she was religious or not.  Her love seemed as unconditional as humanly possible, and I think she sparked the light of goodness which is in you and is in all of us. Others who have then loved you too, have enabled you to produce your invaluable book.

Truth and love are fundamental to my work. Religion is a rather flawed vehicle which I use to develop those values. I practice an extraordinary powerful but simple Buddhist type breathing meditation, but I am not a Buddhist. I find love in Christianity, but I don’t believe in the humanoid god presented therein. I am intuitive rather than impulsive. I am able to refer to a deep and good level before acting, but can sometimes be both fast and powerful. I can be ruthless with those who harm me or those I love.

I believe sociopathy, like any other incapacity, can be improved upon by a relentless search for truth and love through an acceptance that good and evil powers drive our lives from a deep spiritual level. We need to get used to spotting which is which and going for the good one every time. That always yields healing and always leads to happiness for us and those we influence. If we keep doing these good things, they grow in us and it gets easier. Peace, happiness and identity just roll in.

I would love to take you as a client, but England is a big commute.

M.E.:

I probably agree more with you now than the book would suggest, particularly this:

"I believe sociopathy, like any other incapacity, can be improved upon by a relentless search for truth and love through an acceptance that good and evil powers drive our lives from a deep spiritual level. We need to get used to spotting which is which and going for the good one every time. That always yields healing and always leads to happiness for us and those we influence. If we keep doing these good things, they grow in us and it gets easier. Peace, happiness and identity just roll in."

I do think that people have an identity that is not rooted in any sort of evil, like a computer has a backup that is not corrupted by a virus. If you can just get back to that version and restore the hardrive to that, no more virus, no more sociopathy, no more any personality disorder.

Reader:

I got it that the place you are at now is substantially on from some of the episodes you have related in your book. Indeed, you would not have written it otherwise. I absolutely admire you for the courage in giving us the bad stuff. If we gloss over that, we get nowhere, and none of us is squeaky clean. We all need to look at what goes wrong and attend to it. And we all benefit from that in ourselves. We don’t need to say it’s just for others. 
I like your resetting the hard drive. It is my absolute faith that there is a common and good centre to which we all naturally gravitate given the opportunity. Indeed, this was Rogers’ philosophy when he developed his person centred counselling  

I have spent most of my life trying to work out a formula for living which could make sense of the programming I received from parents in the context of the world I have found myself in. I found religion, Christianity in particular, to be helpful on the one hand but misleading on the other. Its bases, love and truth, are unquestionable for me, but the delivery by its practitioners is seriously in question.
My secular counselling practice has forced me to push my thinking to a conclusion so that I could reach deeper spiritual levels with clients who had no religious beliefs, and even those who had been alienated by them. That led me to develop Circle Diagram. It works a treat, and other counsellors find it useful too. It is intended to help a client understand himself. I enclose the article I wrote on it. It attributes a nature to the centre of the circle, our being. The inference in the conclusions is that we gravitate to a centre which supports truth and love. And that reflects your proposal that we all have an identity rooted in good and not in evil. I see evil as negative blobs coming in from outside my circle and my job is to help my clients resolve these blobs which mess up their lives and that of others around them. One of the concepts of the circle centre is that it is the person you were always meant to be before the blobs appeared. And that is part of the aim of the counselling process – get to that perfect being. Again, this correlates with your concept of resetting with the original back up. So far so good. The next bit is the challenge. It is that the reset only comes as a process of resolving the blobs. Clients need to get that the initial change is one of direction and not position. In other words, when you have got the formula, then the hard work of healing then starts. And it proceeds at its own pace, regardless of conscious intent, just as the injured body will heal at it’s own pace. Then persistence is required. But the rewards are amazing.
I also enclose my published article ‘The Sound of Silence’ which proposes a particular type of meditation which I offer and which is available across the planet as far as I know in Buddhist centres. If Rogers’ methods are good, this stuff is amazing. It has to be taught absolutely correctly but then it works wonders.   

Just cause you feel it doesn't mean it's there

Not sure what that lyric means, particularly in this context. But it's an interesting sort of cultural/political divide between the empathetic and the non. On the one hand are the people who think that there emotions basically signal objective reality -- Truth, capital T about the world. On the other side of the perspective, people who think that there is no truth or non-subjective value to emotions.

Martha Nussbaum writes about the potential reasoning value of emotions:

If emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and if they contain in themselves an awareness of value or importance, they cannot, for example, easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment, as so often they have been in the history of philosophy. Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. We cannot plausibly omit them, once we acknowledge that emotions include in their content judgments that can be true or false, and good or bad guides to ethical choice. We will have to grapple with the messy material of grief and love, anger and fear, and the role these tumultuous experiences play in thought about the good and the just.

[…]

Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.

Yes, that sounds right, highly complex and messy parts.

And also, even if they are aspects of our reasoning, that doesn't mean they're not problematic. E.g.:

In the very nature of our early object relations … there lurks a morally subversive combination of love and resentment, which springs directly from the thought that we need others to survive and flourish, but do not at all control their movements. If love is in this way always, or even commonly, mixed up with hatred, then, once again, this might offer us some reasons not to trust to the emotions at all in the moral life, but rather to the more impersonal guidance of rules of duty.

Sociopath?

Asks a reader:

Good morning, or afternoon, evening depending where in the world you find yourself, I'm in the UK.
The amount of these emails you've probably had I've no doubt must be overwhelming and somewhat tedious, but I am compelled to send you another for your perusal, and, hopefully, an insightful opinion.

It's that age old question you are surely plagued with...am I a sociopath?

I'm a 37 year old male and several times, by several different people, most notably my mother, I have been asked, or, had suggested to me that I am a sociopath, I have based myself on self diagnosis and don't believe I am, but, I'd like your opinion if I may.
There are many factors in me that would suggest I am, but in my mind, there are also many which tell me I'm not.
I have recently met a girl who is a self diagnosed sociopath, and I developed an almost instant infatuation with her.
Like nothing I've known before, I can't say for definite if it's love I feel, but if it is, love is good. It is her diagnosis of me which leads me to question myself to you.
I am different, I know that, I know I think.differently to my friends and family and they know it too, but a sociopath? I'm not sure.
Ok, I'll get down to it.
I'll try and keep it factual as I have, as you may already have noticed, a tendency for verbosity.
I have a remarkable memory, I'm pretty sure I could remember being born if I tried, and I can recall minor events throughout my years in perfect clarity, so, if I may, I'd like to share some with you.

As a young boy my mother feared to reprimand me for wrong doings, not because I was violent or angry with her, but because, as she stated, I would stare emptily at her like I wanted to kill her and it frightened her to the point she couldn't make eye contact with me. I quickly learned that I could use this to my advantage and would push the situation beyond what was acceptable to gauge the reaction I could get from her.
I still do, in all walks of life.
I am a practising and passionate Sadist in the bdsm scene, I use the look to frighten the living shit out of potential partners, and it works infallibly.

You know what? I'm going to stop.
I could go on about every moment through my life, but I'm pretty sure you've heard it all before.

I ruin people for pure pleasure, I let people come to me online and in person and find every flaw in them, physically and mentally, as they talk and move I watch and listen.
I was obsessed, well, am, obsessed with Stockholm syndrome, but now I think it may be more than that. I get into people's minds, make them dependant on me to the point when they begin to panic if I don't reply or agree to see them. I become, effortlessly exactly who they need me to be, I build them up, make them exactly who I know they want to be.
Then watch them burn.
And I love it, I quote lyrics from songs at them as they break without them realising I'm doing it. But I don't let them go, I keep them dangling with promises they're the one, only them, that I can change...for them...then I do it again. And again.
I could make them kill themselves, I know I'm perfectly capable of it, but I'm too aware that our conversations via text will likely be on their phone, and I don't want to go to prison.

I do tend to go on.
Apologies for wasting your time, I'll self diagnose online at somepoint.