Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

xp to myself (sorry for blogging) then again, i guess that's just the state of the american math and science educational system that values "watch what the teacher does and copy what the teacher does and then do it again accurately on a standardized test" rather than tinker and explore and figure it out yourself

re stalin and lbj i agree with DLH, i'm not sure how good of a working definition this is going to be because under that rubric pretty much every general or admiral or executive is going to turn out to be a psychopath

alfred i don't think that's going to be forthcoming because afaict ideas about social skills and emotional intelligence or whatever postdate the introduction of TV

he had those weird sadistic dinner parties where he made everyone drink way too much but that's in the twilight of his rule when he's genuinely starting to come unhinged and seems like pretty standard-issue Absolute Power madness.

the most psycho-like guy i ever spent real time with was a dude named l____ with whom i lived for about a year. this was during the early 90s, in a large, cheap and deliriously scuzzy rooming house full of drug & street casualties in seattle's university district. he was a smelly, perennially shirtless young hippie who inhabited a nice, expensive room upstairs with his girlfriend, while i lived in a dismal basement closet for which i paid $50 a month. l____'s girlfriend was sweet, smart and seriously cute.

l____, otoh, was completely insane. he said everything with a weirdly challenging smirk, so you could never tell if he was being sincere or just fucking with you. he was prone to proclamations of his own divinity and fits of furious anger in response to minimal provocation. while he could be decent, in a strangely childlike, moon-eyed way, he often expressed total, withering contempt for everyone around him, including his girlfriend. he seemed to reserve a special contempt for "social fictions" like love and friendship, and was quite up front about the ease with which he was able to manipulate others (including his long-suffering girlfriend, who fled back to massachusetts after a few months).

anyway, i spent a lot of time with l___ because we were both unemployed, creatively dedicated and heavily into weed. we slept until the mid-afternoon and spent days into weeks on end smoking out and painting in his room, going out dumpster-diving or just running around being crazy at night. i've never done better work than during that year. l____ believed that the forces of nature communicated to him through the movements of animals and the patterns of glowing lines he saw everywhere, and he tried to represent this in his work. his extrasensory perceptions mostly made him wrathful, and he often talked about doing harm to the government figures supposedly for responsible for this or that building. he was really pissed about the arrangement of municipal buildings.

i remember hanging out with him on the roof once, watching birds come and go, and he told me about killing animals when he was a kid. squirrels, cats, dogs, etc. he related this with a creepy sort of dispassion, so i asked if he still did it and how he felt about it now. he said no, that he didn't want to kill animals anymore, that he felt bad about it and knew they deserved better. i got the impression, though, that this is what he felt he should say as a good hippie-shaman-type, that none of it really meant much of anything to him. while he was too obviously delusional to be a pass-for-normal psychopath, there was some really dark shit in there that he mostly kept hidden.

I only mention it because I'm reluctant to blame kids these days when I'd rather yell at their parents.

like the idea of social skills dates back to the 30s and 40s but i don't think people were really doing actually empirically studying it until the 50s so there's really no data set to look at

also it's an interesting question to ask what exactly are social skills and interpersonal skills and empathy defined as in societies that did or do things we think are really unthinkable like own slaves or force women to wear burqas or practice human sacrifice

http://www.arthistoryguide.com/images/294.jpg

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel.

as far as The Terror goes i think beria was probably a psychopath. he made stalin's wife's skin crawl from the moment she met him (and stalin back then was not totally dismissive of his wife) but he was a talented enough sycophant that he got to hang around the dacha all the time anyway.

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel

QFT

(plus i think svetlana has a story about playing in the garden and running into beria's feet and looking up and seeing him smile down at her and for a moment just being really fundamentally freaked out in a way she couldn't explain.)

(but she blames him for everything cuz she can't bring herself to put it on her dad.)

recommend me a good book about stalin, this all sounds v v interesting and is something i know zilch about

tbh i think most of what i know about stalin is inferred from "animal farm"

all my juicy stuff here has come from this one; it is also suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper interesting to read svetlana's memoir twenty letters to a friend, even if she's obv not the most objective source. then there's conquest's the great terror for a dryer and less personal but totally exhaustive and horrifying analysis of the purges. the montefiore book also has a prequel called young stalin where he's running around being dashing, writing poetry, robbing armored cars for lenin, etc..

whoa at contenderizer's story . jeepers

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

social skills are entirely context-dependent, so theirs were probably somewhat different than ours. i'm inclined to think, however, that social skills have always existed, whether or not they were defined as such. some people seem easily able to observe, absorb and make use of the complex social environment they inhabit (whether or not they do this consciously). others are almost catastrophically unable to do this. a lot of western literature, going back to shakespeare at least, concerns the application of social skills to achieve personal ends.

Conquest's book is wonderful.

contenderizer did you get the impression that the guy was telling the truth about having killed the animals?

yeah, he seemed pretty reflective in that moment

yikes

i know. that was when i realized i couldn't really be his friend (though his treatment of his gf should have warned me off earlier). i started getting worried he was gonna push me off the roof or something.

my uncle's son has asperger's, he is super good at school and very very smart (he's in 10th grade and doing calculus) and does everything like a normal person (eating, dressing, hygiene, etc) but basically has no interest in anything but video games, particularly sims like farmville and pokemon-type rpgs, but if you want to he is glad to have a two-hour adult-level conversation with you about those topics that even though he is 15. he understands social norms and whatnot and will like get up from his pokemon to help his younger brother if he falls on his face (which he does a lot since he's a rambunctious kid who loves doing this like jumping off furniture) but he would really just rather play pokemon than make friends - except he has a ton of online friends and a few IRL friends who are also super-into pokemon and gaming and they do friend-type things like have little parties that revolve around those interests

i'm not trying to undermine the story at all nor resort to cliché, but srsly aren't mebbe 50% or more of teenagers like this? i was quite a bit like this (green screen game boy 4 lyfe) and my two younger brothers were a lot more so like this, lots of my friends were like this, etc

it's hard to explain w/o actually spending some time w/ these kids and of course everyone has hobbies they fixate on to the exclusion of socializing (lol ilx) but really (like any other "deviant" syndrome) it's a matter of degree and consistency

re conversation upthread comparing autism to sociopathy, obv one connection between the two is undeveloped empathy. i kinda want to read this which i believe deals with the topic of comparing the two: http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins/dp/0465023533

very creepy excerpt from the hare book i mentioned upthread, context not really necessary:

Later Russell worked out several scenarios for handling his problems with his wife and wrote them down on a piece of paper: "Do nothing"; "File for Paternity/Conciliation Court"; "Take girls w/o killing"; "Take girls killing 4"; "Kill girls and Justin."

it was the "w/o" that got me, for some reason

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html?_r=2&hp

A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

I sent the article in the OP to my mom because she has always been interested in psychopaths, and she told me that it reminded her about the kid who used to live across the street from her, the older brother of her friend. she said he would laugh all the time, like when he was being punished, or yelled at, and he acted out A LOT so he got punished A LOT. he punched holes in doors and stuff like that. so she told me about how he would sneak up behind her silently and then start laughing. stuff like that, really menacing.

so she read the article, and we were talking this morning after she read it, and she was like, "yeah, and he was so cute" and i said wait a second, you never mentioned that he was cute...and she said OH YEAH he was cute and proceeded to describe him like some kind of suburban new jersey adonis. she then reconfirmed that she thought he was a psychopath and never knew what happened to him, but assured me that if he had become a murderer, she would have heard about it by now...

http://io9.com/5916074/should-we-eliminate-psychopaths-from-the-gene-pool

mental health expert Jon Ronson

lol

reading these stories, and talking with some friends about that psycho kids article, it's made me think: is there an opposite to psychopathy?

if psychopathy is basically a human tuned toward self-empowerment at the total expense of feeling for others, is there a problematic state going the other way? or is that just sainthood.

lol femininity

depression

no i'm just kidding but yeah, i definitely think the opposite state is a problem. don't know if there's a diagnosis. martyr complex?

xp oh yeah, good call

if you look at the depression thread that's pretty much what it is - people feeling guilty and awful and beating themselves up about shit that's not their fault, trying constantly to live up to some normative ideas about being a good or productive person or making their families proud or whatever that they can't ever live up to

i don't know if depression necessarily includes feeling for others at the expense of oneself, though?

that's kind of where i was going, but psychopathy seems like a constantly painful state as well (i'm brewing another post on this)

well i think depressed people tend to blame themselves when other people do hurtful things, not sure if it necessarily leads to empathy but there is a common thread of "oh that person was an asshole to me, no wonder, i am an unlikable loser and they probably have better things to do" rather than "oh f them they're assholes anyway"

my understanding is that there's a part of your brain that helps you give up. otherwise, we'd never learn to not do anything, and we might kill ourselves trying to reach that same frustratingly distant banana on the end of that branch, or alienate the other members of our monkey tribe by being all "me first" all the time. and your brain does similar things when its frustrated / giving up as depressed people's brains do all the time. i imagine an impulsive person or a psychopath might have the opposite brain make-up

but who knows, i am kinda suspicious of evolutionary psychology and i know that in neurobiology its frustratingly hard to separate cause and effect in the way you want to.

of course i am not a doctor, but, my experience with people who fit the dsm markers for psychopathy really leads me to believe it is a disorder of fear and anxiety, fwiw.

as a basic set of statements, everyone has some kind of mixture of fear and hope when dealing with any stranger (politeness and basic social norms govern these) and some mixture of will-to-pleasure and sympathetic connection to others in your life. ime the borderline-types have their fight-or-flight responses jammed always to fight, over basically nothing. it seems like a really extreme form of self-protection. they can't bear to give anything or to place themselves in a position of weakness for a second, and have to struggle to maintain dominance in all situations, no matter how trivial or short-sighted. the unknown is always trying to fuck you over, and everyone is always unknown to some degree.

i guess this could be a learned (or, uh, beaten in) variety of the disorder as the examples i had in mind had some really rough and, importantly, arbitrarily horrible experiences while young. what i'm describing is not a soul-deep understanding of the human world as being pathetic and weak, but being sneaky and hostile.

right, and that squares w/ the accepted idea that depressed people are basically constantly in flight / withdrawal mode

well put!

it is important though to recognize the social norms involved - a psychopath might be very disruptive to the lives of the people around them, but a depressed person can be the same (by not getting out of bed for several days, to use an example i'm acquainted with). we tend to think of the former as much worse than the latter but i'm not sure that's true.

http://guyism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ferris-cameron.jpeg

Lock thread

goole, what you're describing does not sound to me like psychopathy

my understanding is that there's a part of your brain that helps you give up.

Don't I fuckin' know it.

Thread relevant but pretty terrible article about how we can all learn some good tricks from psychopaths:

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/13/how_psychopaths_take_over/

I think maybe more interesting as Exhibit A on the pop cultureization of psychopathy.

What would you think if somebody started trying to make deals with somebody you didn't get along with about you behind your back online , then openly announced they'd done that to a whole chatlist you were on?

Just been wondering about this for a while.

also if after a rather psychotic flame had been posted about putting an individual's child in the microwave, somebody reposted the flame message to show how it was punctuated?