The Sociopath Next Door

Posted on by kay

 

–excerpts from Martha Stout’s excellent book, The Sociopath Next Door, pgs. 9-13

 

“About one in twenty-five individuals [4%, or 4 in every 100 people] are sociopathic, meaning, essentially, that they do not have a conscience. It is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior. The intellectual difference between right and wrong does not bring on the emotional sirens and flashing blue lights, or the fear of God, that it does for the rest of us. Without the slightest blip of guilt or remorse, one in twenty-five people can do anything at all…

…Most of us feel slightly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers…

…The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron — or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer — is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions…

…For something like 96% of us, conscience is so fundamental that we seldom even think about it… But not to care at all about the effects of our actions on society, on friends, on family, on our children? What would that be like?…

…all other psychiatric diagnoses (including narcissism) involve some amount of personal distress or misery for the individuals who suffer from them. Sociopathy stand alone as a “disease” that causes no dis-ease for the person who has it, no subjective discomfort. Sociopaths are often quite satisfied with themselves and with their lives, and perhaps for this very reason there is no effective “treatment.”

 

—The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout, PhD, Broadway Books, New York, excerpts taken from pgs 9-13.

 

 

Enemy-making

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“Enemy-making seems to serve a vital purpose: those qualities that we cannot tolerate in ourselves we can unconsciously and painlessly attribute to our enemies. When observed through psychological lenses, enemy-making is a transposition of shadow onto others who, for often complicated reasons, fit our images of the inferior. We need only to think of the people whom we judge or dislike or against whom we hold secret prejudices to find ourselves in the grip of our shadow nature.

At the level of nation, race, religion, or other collective identity, we can witness enemy-making being enacted in mythic, dramatic, and often tragic proportions. Wars, crusades, and persecutions are the terrible estate of this form of the human shadow, which is, to some degree, a legacy of our instinctual tribal heritage. The greatest cruelties in human history have been carried out in the name of righteous causes, when the shadows of entire nations have been projected onto the face of an enemy and thus an alien group can be made into a foe, a scapegoat, or an infidel.”

–Introduction to Part 8, “Enemy-making: Us and Them in the Body Politic,” from Meeting the Shadow, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams, pg 195.

“Generation after generation, we find excuses to hate and dehumanize each other, and we always justify ourselves with the most mature-sounding political rhetoric. And we refuse to admit the obvious. We human beings are homo hostilis, the hostile species, the enemy-making animal. We are driven to fabricate an enemy as a scapegoat to bear the burden of our denied enmity. From the unconscious residue of our hostility, we create a target; from our private demons, we conjure a public enemy. And perhaps, more than anything else, the wars we engage in are compulsive rituals, shadow dramas in which we continually try to kill those parts of ourselves we deny and despise.”

–Essay from Meeting the Shadow by Sam Keen, “The Enemy Maker,” pg 198.

 

Alas, Our Collective Shadow Doesn’t Just Share the Good Things

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James Hollis is one of the great psychological thinkers, lecturers, and authors of our time. Here’s a quote from Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves, Gotham Books, pages 108-109, about the power of  the collective shadow.

 

“Everywhere we move, our Shadow trails us–its hidden agendas, its repressed motives, its imposing history, its un-lived life, its fear-driven stratagems. Into relationships, into work life, into the dream I dream tonight, the Shadow elements are dynamically active. And if this is so of any and each of us, only one person, what happens wherever more than one are gathered?

Does not the shadow go with each of them, occasion contrary, or mutual, projections, blend together, provide an even greater sum of darkness? Is not the Shadow of a group more than the sum of individual Shadows, and might it not create a whole new dimension of unconsciousness?

Just as two persons can intermingle their Shadows, producing the famous folie a deux, so groups can suffer a collective contagion, a group madness, a communal enthusiasm. We have only to look at the sad chronicle of human history to see collective contagions, participatory madness, wars and witch hunts, and the violence that may rise from collective possessions.

 

Just as the ego of the individual is predisposed to defend itself, prejudice its limited purview of reality, reject those elements that are discordant, disruptive, and threatening, so, too, groups always have a fluid, amorphous, but highly vulnerable “ego.” From any region of our psyche excluded from sustained self-examination, much energy may be released, for good or ill, no matter how benign the intent of the group may be.

 

Moreover, that fluid, amorphous ego is always highly susceptible to the manipulation of a charismatic leader. Each individual in the group brings complexes, needs, and hidden agendas waiting to be activated. Dictators, politicians, and televangelists skillfully exploit this group fluidity–comprised both of collective insecurities and the unexamined lives of each individual multiplied.”

 

 

And alas, collective shadow contagions are easier to share than they have ever been, as it is easier than it has ever been for like minded kooks to share their contagions.

Projecting Our Own Evil Onto Others

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“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 shadow, which never fails to lead us into every possible exaggeration and fascination.”
–Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche

Imagine a movie projector. You’d be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re CREATING the image, the image is actually coming from you, but the other person is the only place where you can SEE the image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality of our own 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!”

“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

It Ain’t Just Donald

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In “The Strongmen Strike Back,” (Washington Post, March 18th) Robert Kagan did a very thorough job of making it clear that Donald Trump is not just some isolated aberration in American history. Trump is part of a world wide wave of authoritarianism endangering the very idea of democracy.

Kagan brilliantly covered the subject from a political perspective, and I heartily recommend his article. But my curiosity reaches toward the psychological.

WHY do so many people — not just in the USA, but all over the world — follow cruel and unethical strongmen whom they know they cannot trust?

WHY do so many of us so long to be told what to do?

WHY do so many of us long to be told who to hate?

That’s what we need to be worrying about.

Not how much we love or hate Trump, but what how much we love or hate Trump says about us.

Apocalypse by Clicking

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“We are unlikely to face a rebellion of sentient machines in the coming decades, but we might have to deal with hordes of bots that know how to press our emotional buttons better than our mother does and that use this uncanny ability, at the behest of a human elite, to try to sell us something–be it a car, a politician, or an entire ideology. The bots might identify our deepest fears, hatreds, and cravings and use them against us.

We have already been given a foretaste of this in recent elections and referendums across the world, when hackers learned how to manipulate individual voters by analyzing data about them and exploiting their prejudices.

While science-fiction thrillers are drawn to dramatic apocalypses of fire and smoke, in reality we may be facing a banal apocalypse by clicking.”

–from “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” by Yuval Noah Harari, October 2018, The Atlantic

Beyond Us and Them

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Seeing where others have failed us — parents, teachers, cultures, etc — is an important developmental step. It helps us process the hurts and injustices we’ve experienced.
But it’s only the first step.
Seeing where WE have failed OTHERS is the next — and far more difficult — step.

Let’s Keep Unscrupulous Psychopaths from Ruling the World

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Donald Trump likes to say he’s the “greatest.”

This is what Swiss analytical psychologist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig had to say about “great” men 20 years ago. It is more true, and more chilling, than ever.

“Contrary to popular belief, there are certain advantages to being a psychopath or compensated psychopath. Many of them have a relatively easy time adapting to society, unencumbered as they are by moral or neurotic scruples. They replace the lack of love or of true relationship with a love of power, something they can achieve without too much difficulty owing to the absence of moral or Eros-related restraints…

It is little wonder that psychopaths occupy so many of the top positions in society and rather astonishing that there are not more in such positions. Let me put it somewhat differently. One of the major problems of any society, of any political or large organization in general, is that of preventing unscrupulous, socially adapted psychopaths from gradually taking over the helm. 

There are many countries in which the problem is a long way from being solved. There are even certain countries whose political organization encourages psychopaths to rise to positions of power, where only psychopaths can achieve such positions. It is not difficult to imagine in what spirit such nations are ruled. Nazi Germany is  good example.

All dictorial forms of government, be they left-wing or right-wing regimes, are certainly to some extent dominated by psychopaths. Stalin was probably a psychopath, with a pronounced shadow and a decided power drive. Trotsky, originally his friend, was more of an idealist, but observe: Stalin died of natural causes at a ripe old age; Trotsky was murdered. There seems to be some truth to the expression, “the good die young.”

One is inclined to ask how, in a democratic country, we may prevent psychopaths from inveigling their way to the top. The power of the highest administrative positions is so strictly curtailed in Switzerland, for example, that it hardly tempts psychopaths. It seems to me even more important that the people be able to see through a psychopath, to see through their own psychopathic side. In most democracies, this ability is well enough developed so that a dangerous psychopath is usually detected when he appears on the scene.

I am convinced that a democracy whose citizens are incapable of discerning a psychopath will be destroyed by power-hungry demagogues. In Switzerland the resistance towards “great men” and the preference for mediocre political figures would seem to result from an instinctual desire to prevent psychopaths from coming to power.

Although there is certainly such a thing as a “great man,” many such figures are probably nothing more than unrecognized psychopaths. Think of personages such as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, William II of Germany and many, many other more or less esteemed leaders of the past and present. These “great” criminals–and one must include Hitler and Stalin among them–destroyed the lives of millions. Themselves “erotically” stunted, they succeeded in obtaining recognition and power over  societies in which they, themselves, felt shut out, power which was necessary to maintain the illusion that they actually belonged.

Happy the nation which gives such “great” men (and women) short shrift.”

Excerpted from Eros on Crutches, in Meeting the Shadow, edited by Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams. [Bold type of certain phrases added.]

Three Cheers for Roland Paris

Posted on by kay

 

I am cheered to see an apt psychological summation of the human shadow emerge from the world of politics.

When US President Donald Trump re-acted with a characteristically mean personal attack after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something Trump didn’t like about trade between their two countries — which was simply the truth, had been said before, and should have been no surprise at all to Trump — Roland Paris, a former advisor to Trudeau and a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Ottawa had this to say on twitter about Trump:

“Big tough guy once he’s back on his airplane. Can’t do it in person, and knows it, which makes him feel [weak]. So he projects these feelings onto Trudeau and then lashes out at him. You don’t need to be Freud. He’s a pathetic little man-child.”

Thank you, Roland. For stating exactly how the deadly cycle of denial, projection, and blame is manifesting yet again in the current president of the United States.

Thanks also to other political analysts, who pointed out: since Trump was on his way to a meeting with another famously cruel dictator, he thought a personal trouncing of someone who dared to disagree with him would make him look tough in the eyes of the other dictator.

How low we have sunk.

The problem with them or us

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The problem with rigid dualistic thinking — us or them, black or white, good or bad, my way or the highway — is that it leaves out everything except one’s own narrow point of view.

Like the blind men and the elephant, you think it’s like a snake, he thinks it’s like a tree, and she thinks it’s like a house. Without better sight, without actually taking in the entire creature, the blind men are never going to be able to agree about the elephant.

Unless today’s rampant partisanship is the last gasp of rigidly dualistic nationalism, we are in severe danger of being squashed by the elephant.

Remember how lovely the earth looked in those pictures taken from the moon? It wasn’t fractured into a million pieces. It was one thing, one whole thing.

Taking rigid nationalism this far into the 21st century puts that one whole thing at risk.