The Psychopath Mantra: Chaos Is Power

by Raymond King

They told you to win friends and smile often.

They told you to hustle harder, promising happiness would follow.

They told you to embrace suffering, calling it the ultimate reward.

But deep down, you’ve always wondered: Is this too good to be true?

Meanwhile, the ruling class has never been more powerful, more shameless, more efficient. Here’s the simple truth: Unless you feel inadequate, they cease to exist.

The Psychopath Mantra takes you inside the predatory mind of the ruling class. This is self-improvement through the eyes of professional psychopaths, raw and uncensored. Behind their polished smiles lies a dark philosophy, condensed into four concise sections (because elites never have time to read):

1. Overcoming Morality — How morality traps you in self-doubt, and why moving beyond it is the key to charisma.

2. The Martyr Game — How the illusion of sacrifice is crafted by disrupting how you think.

3. Embrace Resentment — Why vilifying resentment hides its real power as a tool for control.

4. Illusions Becoming Truth — How envy can help you become larger than life.

Inspired by Meditations—a favorite among elites—The Mantra is a sharp, instantly quotable guide that challenges conventional ideas of power and success.

Satire or self-help? You decide.

100 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 25, 2024

About the author

Raymond King writes primarily speculative fiction and philosophy, exploring the clash between our innate desire to conform and need to rebel. His work delves into themes of personal transformation, mass psychosis, and the interplay between the two.

Reviews

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Self-help, but honest about our broken system

It’s not every day you come across a book that satirizes the self-improvement genre and somehow ties it all back to the political chaos we’re living through.

The core idea is sound: the elites in charge are not some alien cabal with high IQ--they are products of the same system of morality we grew up in. Shaped by the same schools, media, and self-help rituals we know as well. We like to think of evil as something monstrous and otherworldly, but maybe it’s just well adapted. And maybe, by understanding how these people think, we can figure out what part of us makes them possible.

At first glance, the book might come off as bleak or even nihilistic, but to me, it’s actually the opposite. This isn’t a manual for tyrants, it’s more like a mirror. It shows how our ideas about morality and charisma can be twisted, and how certain people thrive by turning those things into tools of control.

If you’re into books like The 48 Laws of Power, Beyond Good and Evil, or E.M. Cioran, this will resonate. There’s also a smart twist on the whole “end of history” idea that I didn’t see coming.

[Nick S · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is unlike any book I’ve read. It’s written in a style that seamlessly blends satire and philosophy. There are many layers to how you can understand the text. At times, it’s brazen and provocative, like an anarchist version of The Prince, and other times it’s surprisingly poignant and empathetic. It made me think about the world differently.

[E.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having worked with a fair number of sociopaths in the corporate and nonprofit sector, I resonated with a lot of the insights in this book. I was often the youngest person in the room, and for a long time, I had a really hard time dealing with all the office politics and manipulation that go on behind the scenes. People will steal credit of your work and laugh in your face if you didn’t know how to respond. When things go wrong, leadership would throw a fire drill, pretending it’s everyone else’s fault but their own. Sounds like the politics we have today, doesn’t it?

I say all this b/c this book has the guts to say what other self-help books would rather avoid. Yeah, we can make small changes, we can try not to care, we can talk different, we can try positive thinking, and all those things certainly help, but how much can things really improve just by working on ourselves? There’s a reason these corporate overlords love professional development so much. Obedience for you, not for them. I won’t spoil it for you, some of the advice here while they sound a bit dark on the surface are quite useful.

Think 48 laws of power but hyper compressed on the main points, no historical fluff, but more philosophical. I do wish the author elaborated on some of his points more, but I also appreciate being trusted to draw my own conclusions.

Also, the wordplay is pretty good.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Few books on politics today present original ideas. Most of the stuff you get is either investigative journalism or partisan puff pieces. The Psychopath Mantra is a gem of a book. It was certainly a pleasant surprise. I’d never heard of the author before. I got the book b/c I liked the concept. Now that I’ve read the book a couple times, I have to say I’m impressed. The author says more in a few sentences than many books do in hundreds of pages. The book is full of memorable lines. It’s both a takedown of the establishment and its own kind of subversive philosophy. A lot of the ideas you take for granted get flipped on their head; and some of the advice is surprisingly practical. Also, the satire on shamelessness is pretty dead-on. You see it in management at work, media rewriting history, the incessant culture wars. I want to read more from this author.

[Stefani Goerlich · Rating 2 out of 5]

This reads like a 22 year old from r/antiwork read Marcus Aurelius and decided he could do it better. It’s vague and poorly defined, not clear enough to even be legible as a “mantra.” It does contain a (rare) few interesting ideas- I think I underlined maybe 5-6 lines total- which is why I’m giving it 2 stars, rather than 1.

Overall? Too full of itself to even bother explaining itself properly. You won’t miss anything valuable if you don’t read this book.

[Jeff Pedersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay then

[Megan Prendergast · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ooof

[James Magrini · Rating 3 out of 5]

I purchased this short, "self-published" book on a whim...Nice use of literary aphorism as form of expression - a style often difficult to master. Here, the author does an admirable job.

It's sort of a (well-organized) hodgepodge of philosophical viewpoints expressive of what might be termed "anarchist" self-help in a desperate age requiring authenticity, rebellion, and the creation of "new values" - i.e., a new morality and sense of subject-hood that transcends old familiar and stifling ways of indoctrinated living and thinking...Dare I say, a 2024 call for the “trans-valuation of all values hitherto”!

For potential readers unaware of what appears to be at least some of the author's sources for inspiration, see: (1) Foucault on social-political structures of power, (2) Nietzsche on "philosophizing with a hammer" - in the quest to "sound out" the vacuousness of our idols and to then draw/find the inspiration to destroy - with joy and extreme prejudice - their "clay legs"! (3) Gray’s critique of the hidden eschatological religious tendencies in all political (utopian) regimes, (4) Adorno’s work on the “culture industry,” and (5) the rebellious logic of Weinberg’s warning to the disenfranchised youth in the 1960s, “Trust no one under thirty!”

Ultimately, it appears as if the book’s aim is to reveal insight into the psychopathic mind (collective) bent on wielding power to dominate and control. To combat this drive, in the quest for liberation, one must (also) become, in a renewed and more finely honed sense, a “psychopath”. Such an idea necessitates caution. For here, is it possible that the cure (solution) becomes indistinguishable from the illness (problem)?

The author has also, in addition to this philosophical offering, penned a fiction (fantasy/science-fiction) book titled, Alien Nation, which I have not read. Do I sense a kindred bond between Raymond King and Thomas Ligotti? (See my review of his The Conspiracy of the Human Race)

James M. Magrini
Former: Philosophy/College of DuPage