Status Updates From The Sociopath Next Door

Always the tone of pained surprise about American culture being individualistic, from Harvard eggheads. Who encouraged antisocial behavior? Maybe Carl Rogers (champion of bring ‘our true authentic selves’) and Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy leading to self-actualization of potential, and ACT, Modern Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ‘live by yr own core values’?

Traditional Inuit approach to a kunlangeta (a man that lies, cheats, steals, refuses to hunt, and takes advantage of women while other men hunt): insist he go hunting, then push him off the edge of the ice when no witnesses are around.
Sometimes the old ways are best.

“Quite unlike sociopaths, children…afflicted with attachment disorders are seldom charming or interpersonally clever. On the contrary, these unfortunate individuals are typically somewhat off-putting, nor do they make any great efforts to ‘fake’ being normal. They are isolates. Their emotional presentation is flat and uninviting, or sometimes directly hostile” or swing between indifference and neediness.

Narcissists may feel strongly but they don’t have the ability to walk in someone else’s emotional shoes’ “a failure not of conscience but of empathy”.

So sociopaths feel no obligation and their minds work harder when on an assignment involving emotional words because their EQ is impaired… but they react strongly to negative stimuli (frustration may spark rage). They may experience a rush from a predatory ‘win’ of cat and mouse “as a moment of glee”.

“Sociopaths sometimes exhibit brief, intense enthusiasms - hobbies, projects, involvements with people - that are without commitment or follow-up. These interests appear to begin abruptly and for no reason, and to end the same way.”

“As obvious as the nose on one’s face, and just as difficult to see without the help of a mirror, the explanation is that good people will let pathetic individuals get by with murder, so to speak, and therefore any sociopath wishing to continue with his game…should play repeatedly for none other than pity.”

How do you tell an untrustworthy person? “the pity play”, “an appeal to our sympathy” is a universal behavioral trait of unscrupulous people. I’d agree with that. And yet that’s hard to distinguish when everyone wants to be a victim for the sympathy it generates.

“To admit that some people literally have no conscience is not technically the same as saying that some human beings are evil, but it is disturbingly close. And good people want very much not to believe in the personification of evil.” Again, which industry pushed very hard to eradicate this ‘outmoded’ way of thinking? Psychology and psychiatry.

“Obedience to apparent authority is a knee-jerk reaction in most people quite without training, and to sensitize this reflex is to make our children hypervulnerable to any aggressive or sociopathic ‘authority’ who may come along later in our lives.” Not quite. Teach them to discern ‘apparent’ from real authority, rather than questioning every authority because they have no standards of assessment.

“Many people without conscience will behave self-destructively simply for the purposes of the game.” Makes sense in a way, if they can’t see downstream consequences for others, they won’t really see consequences for themselves either.

“Sociopaths, people with no intervening sense of obligation based in attachments to others, typically devote their lives to interpersonal games, to ‘winning’, to domination for the sake of domination.”

So the face of evil doesn’t exist (M. Scott Peck’s assertions to the contrary), but aggressive sociopaths can use the conscience of others to their own advantage by appealing to them to “improve the conditions of humanity” and by weaponizing social bonding tools. And somehow this is supposed to be a scientific discussion.

“Being natural actors, conscienceless people can make full use of social and professional roles, which constitute excellent ready-made masks that other people are loath to look behind.”’Yep, definitely met a few of these.

Charm, spontaneity, risk-taking with no regard for rules (making people feel like hidebound fuddie-duddies for refusing) - yep, met a few of these. Also the ones that use sex as an emotional manipulation tool to make others do their bidding.

“The intense charm of people who have no conscience, a kind of inexplicable charisma, has been observed and commented on by countless victims”. Wondering if i know a a Reformed Presbyterian minister could fit this bill. He had enough charm to dazzle an entire Presbytery into overlooking his bullying.

“The covetous sociopath is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing”. Acquisitive plus conscienceless…okay I’ll buy that as an option.

Maybe what annoys me is the unqualified assumption that PostModern People Have Evolved Past Former Ages. She’s shocked by people cheering at a bonfire that reminds her of witch burning trials and thinks her fellow New Englanders are “unscarred by hardship or menacing superstition.” How do you know, smarty pants? You analyze them all and volunteer with the local police?

“Unprotected sex does not start wars.” Uh, the War of the Roses? Mark Antony and Cleopatra and the Battle of Actium? King Henry VIII?! Possibly half of European historical conflicts have something to do with illicit affairs.

“Toothaches do not cause hate crimes.” This was clearly written prior to the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo NY, in which the shooter blamed lack of dental care (tied to a specific demographic) for his homicidal tendencies.

Odd to say that conscience is “a creator of meaning”. It’s a means of restraint, maybe guardrails on the path of meaning, but surely the creation of meaning is a multi-faceted function of the soul?

After explaining moral dilemma between dog caretaking and work responsibilities, test case Joe’s conscience is approved and we move on to church fathers vs Freud and his ‘discovery’ of the tripartite nature of the soul (id, ego, superego). So glad we’ve now moved on to ‘scientific’ exploration of man’s moral sense as dreamed up by Freud?