I’m feeling sorta gobstopped today. Outfoxed. Outplayed.

 

Like while most of us were nodding wisely about how humanity has moved beyond them now, those “Three monotheistic horsemen of perpetual bossdom and war: Christianity, Judaism and Islam,” as Grace Paley once called them, were teaming up with the internet, capitalism, and power hungry psychopaths to truly take over.

 

When all schools are religious and all courts are corrupt and all science is suspect, where will we be?

 

In a Second Dark Ages. That’s where.

 

It is never a good idea to underestimate your enemies.

 

 

–Quote from “The Story Hearer,” in Later The Same Day, by Grace Paley

 

 

If you were surprised or shocked by my post quoting Harvard psychologist Marcia Stout on the tendency toward sociopathy in human beings — her statistic is 4 percent, or 1 in every 25 people — please make sure you’re sitting in a supportive chair with both feet planted firmly on the floor before you read this post.

 

Sociopathy is not the only way that human brains can run amok. In “A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths,” in the online Atlantic, April 2025, Arthur C. Brooks explains what psychologists call the “Dark Triad.”

 

The Dark Triad consists of Narcissism (it’s all about me), Machiavellianism (I’m willing to hurt you to get what I want), and Sociopathy (I feel no empathy for your situation nor remorse after I hurt you).  7% of the population tend to show above average levels of these three tendencies.  In other words, seven percent of us are up to no good. Furthermore, all three of these tendencies are strongly tied to sadism (enjoying other people’s distress or pain).

 

In her research on betrayal and trauma theory at the University of Oregon, Jennifer Freyd developed the acronym DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — to explain how such folks operate. When caught in the wrong they deny any and all wrongdoing then go vehemently on the attack, claiming they’re the ones being abused, not the actual victim.

 

Sound kinda familiar?

 

“This ploy is everywhere in politics, media, and the internet — anywhere, in fact, with a considerable population of bad faith actors. Some scholars argue that we now inhabit a “culture of offense,” a way of turning a claim that some behavior or statement is offensive into, in effect, a right to be offended.” –Arthur C. Brooks, online Atlantic, April 2025, “A Defense Against Gaslighting Sociopaths.”

 

Sounds very familiar.

 

 

See “Rules will be necessary to handle the ruthless,” below.

 

 

 

 

“Democracy is a discipline, like diet and exercise, strenuous and irksome. Sooner take a pill or eat cake.”
— “From, To,” by David Bezmozgis, story in April 14th New Yorker

Yup. That’s democracy these days. Strenuous and irksome.

And those of us born into democracy have been taking it for granted, like we take our bodies for granted when we slack off on diet and exercise.

We’ve put the health of our democracy on auto pilot, thinking it would take care of itself, like we hope our bodies will take care of themselves, and now we’re wondering how in the world our democracy got so sick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The term ‘alpha male’ was coined to describe behavior in packs of animals — canines like wolves or coyotes, or great apes like gorillas and chimpanzees.

 

Which makes it interesting that Elon Musk, who would like to take control of our country’s finances, thinks that a few “highly intelligent alpha males” should be allowed to tell all the rest of us what to do.

 

Set aside the argument about intelligence, which comes in many forms. And set aside the fact that most forms of intelligence do not lead to obsessions with Mars or misogynism or a lust for power.

 

Just ponder the fact that someone so desperate for attention he buys his own social media platform thinks “alpha males” are really cool.

 

The internet was supposed to lead to good things. It was supposed to further human evolution. But unless we’re more careful from here on out, the internet will further our de-volution. Our algorithms will herd us into packs of snarling animals, fighting constantly for supremacy over one another.

 

 

 

 

 

 

No matter your party, it’s pretty safe to say that you feel beaten up after this last election. When one person alone can spend $277 million to get his candidates elected, we’ve all heard way too many ads, way too much news. And if you’re a Democrat or an Independent, it’s also pretty safe to say that you’re feeling baffled. How could someone known to be shady, under-handed, sexually abusive, politically dangerous, and prone to viciously attacking anyone who opposes him just been made President of the United States of America? Again!!?

 

Of course there are lots of reasons. To focus on one of them, I’m re-submitting an older post of mine, here. The statistics in it come from a book by Marsha Stout, PhD., who served on the faculty in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School for 25 years. Her book is called The Sociopath Next Door.

 

Worldwide, 4% of the population — that means 4 out of every 100, or 1 in every 25 people — has no conscience, which is the clinical definition of a sociopath.

 

Stop and think about those numbers for a minute. 4 out of every 100, or 1 in every 25 people… could clinically be labeled sociopathic.

 

And while that statistic sounds ridiculously high the first time you hear it, after you think about it for a while — the ever presence of crime, the hard drug cartels, the ubiquitousness of bullying, the completely unnecessary wars started by heartless dictators over and over again in history, child and sex slavers, torture, rape — that statistic starts to make some sense.

 

Such a person can do anything –absolutely anything– without feeling guilty. It’s a brain wiring issue. They simply do not have empathy for others. And these are typically high energy, charismatic people, who wreck a great deal of damage in the world because the rest of us let them.

 

Yup. We let them. Since most of us can’t imagine hurting others without feeling guilt or shame, we completely miss what the sociopaths among us are up to. While we feel bad about eating the last piece of cake, a sociopath enjoys getting more than their fair share. A sociopath lives for getting more than their fair share. These folks are driven by power over others, not by ethics.

 

In some cultures, say Switzerland or Japan, where overt narcissism or bullying is frowned upon, it’s difficult for sociopaths to make much headway. But in cultures like ours, where bad boys are celebrated and outlaws become famous, a clever sociopath can take an express elevator right to the top. Particularly today. Now such a person can buy themselves TV stations and online media outlets. Now they can just lie and lie and keep on lying until no one can even remember what actually happened.

 

Unless we want the USA to be completely ruled by sociopaths from here on out, we need to stop letting them get away with murder. We need better rules and laws. And we need to enforce those rules and laws, or those among us who do not play fair are going to come out on top, every time, from here on out.

 

Everyone knows Trump didn’t win the election against Biden. Everyone knows the ‘Big Lie’ is exactly that. But we are still letting him hold our entire country hostage. Everyone knows there is no reason for Russia to annex Ukraine, but Putin is still getting away with waging a bloody, horribly damaging war on a neighboring country. And Gaza? Ghastly.

 

Sure, people without a conscience can be useful candidates if your aim is to pack the Supreme Court with conservatives or block all of the other party’s legislation. But, what happens in the long run? Do we really want to establish the precedent of whatever it takes to win, in the United States of America? That is not democracy, folks. That’s Putin’s Russia. The boss says do it, so we do it… (I heard a good joke the other day: “What’s the difference between Donald Trump and an old style mob boss? The old style mob boss had on a nicer suit.” )

 

We need to get beyond the childishly naive idea that everyone’s gonna play nice. The sociopaths among us are not ever going to play nice, and they constitute 4% of the population, all around the world.

 

So let’s make lying to the public for personal political gain HURT. Let’s make tampering with election results HURT. Let’s make political bribery HURT. Let’s make evading taxes and profiting from the Presidency HURT. Let’s make refusing to testify or pleading “The Fifth” over and over again in court HURT. Let’s make trying to wrest more power from the Presidency than our constitution allows, HURT.

 

Let’s stop pretending that the sociopaths among us are ever going to play fair, and start holding them accountable when they don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Criterion Channel has been putting on a special Noir-vember selection: film noir classics circa the 1930s to the 1960s.

 

During one of them last night, I was thinking about how many males seem to want to return to those times. When women had no power, when women could be slapped around, when women were either good homely wives in aprons or dumb sexy moll dolls in furs, when if a woman did acquire power it was by being even more evil than the gangsters and the cops.

 

Bit of contrast to what Jeanne Moreau –that “barbed wire fence on fire”– was pulling off in France. She calls ALL the shots in her films. (Sorry! Side track. We are not in France.)

 

What I completely missed before this last election (should I start listening to Joe Rogan or right wing ‘news’ channels to keep up?) was how many dissatisfied, disgruntled, and disturbed men there are in the USA. Men who are not yet psychologically or intellectually capable of keeping up with where the human race is obviously headed; men who still respond to a power hungry ‘bad boy’ rule breaker better than to anyone else; men who’ll do whatever a powerful gangster tells them to do, even when it is clearly not in their own best interest.

 

Like I said, Noir-vember, 2024.

 

 

Given what we’ve all just been through given the recent election, this seemed like a good one to re-post:

 

 

“Groups always have a fluid, amorphous but highly vulnerable group “ego.” Moreover, that fluid, amorphous group ego is always highly susceptible to the manipulation of a charismatic leader. Charismatic madness touches and activates the “mad parts” in otherwise quite sane people. Psychological contagions, Shadow plagues, do occur, and few of us, if any, are exempt.” —James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things

 

 

“Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one’s own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred.” —Vaclav Havel, The Shadow in America

 

 

“If we do not see our own shadow, we project it onto other people, who then have a fascinating effect on us. We are compelled to think about them all the time; we get disproportionately stirred up about them and may even start to persecute them. This does not mean that certain people whom we hate are not in truth intolerable; but even in such cases we could deal with them in a reasonable manner or avoid them—if they were not the projection of our own shadow, which never fails to lead us into every possible exaggeration and fascination.”—Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche 

 

 

“A predominant behavior characteristic of those I would call evil is scapegoating. Because in their hearts they consider themselves above reproach, they must lash out at anyone who does reproach them. They sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection. Since deep down they feel themselves to be faultless, it is inevitable that when they are in conflict with the world they will perceive the conflict as the world’s fault. Since they must deny their own badness, they must perceive others as bad. They project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil; on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others.”—M. Scott Peck, from “Healing Human Evil,” in Meeting the Shadow

 

 

 “The collective Shadow can take form as mass phenomena in which entire nations become possessed. When a minority is forced to carry the projection of what a majority of the society denies about itself, the potential for great evil is activated.”—Connie Zwieg and Jeremiah Abrams, Meeting the Shadow

 

 

“Consider the convenience of knowing who the enemy is, always. If the enemy is there, they are not here, so I have no burden of consciousness, no obligation of self-examination.”—James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things

 

 

“If there are some things you just can’t stand to admit about yourself, if you just can’t face some of your own stuff, then you’ll see your own stuff on someone else’s face. It’s called projection, and it happens all the time. It starts with denial, and it ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don’t like—or are ashamed of, or don’t want to think about, or can’t bring ourselves to deal with—and then we project it out onto another person, whom we then condemn vociferously.

 

 

Imagine a movie projector. You’d be the projector whirring in that little room up at the back of the theater, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re creating the image. The image is being produced inside your head, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image. Projection.

 

 

Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality we’re projecting, while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. “I don’t have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? YOU have a TERRIBLE temper!!*#%* —Kay Plumb, Shadow in the USA

 

 

 

“Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world.”—Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow

 

 

 

 

Kudos to Netflix for producing a documentary called “Hitler and the Nazis, Evil on Trial,” and for running it now.

It’s the story of how a less-than-mediocre man with a gift for gab molded a dissatisfied and angst-filled Germany into the worst human catastrophe so far in history; a story of how easily social unease can be channeled into violence and racial hatred by a sociopath who’s obsessed with power and truly believes in his own infallibility.

Told from the point of view of William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,  during the Nuremberg trials. He was a journalist in Germany during Hitler’s rise, barely got out with his life and his journals, and continued reporting on Hitler after he got back to the US.