misc.txt

Creative acts do not necessarily require an external audience. Social humans can speak to imaginary audiences. "I am you are we." This is how we create alone. Partly practice, partly speculation on our future audience. I think it is rare for social humans to create, and then destroy their work. The desire for social feedback is so strong.

Social humans can thus be happy alone (an observation from @ColumPaget), as they carry company with them in their minds. Mallory is uncomfortable alone, he needs other people. When Alice or Bob go on a long walk alone, it is to talk to the many voices in their head. When Mallory goes on a long walk, it is to hunt.







++ Half Human

I've looked at how Mallory attacks. Now I'm now going to look at how we can defend ourselves against that. The first and oldest defence against monsters is magic.

Many a teenager fantasizes of switching from hunted to hunter. It is a trope of popular culture. The timid, shy adolescent male gets a bite from some magical creature. It may be a werewolf, a radioactive spider, a vampire. He develops supernatural powers. He becomes part monster, part human. He becomes strong, good looking, and charming. He hunts other monsters.

In such stories there is always a clear moral divide. The mass of humanity is innocent and unaware. The emotionless monsters prey on these "normal" humans. The hero fights the monsters. At the climax it seems he will lose everything. Then he draws on his human strengths. He collects his empathy, his emotions, and above all, his friends. He fights the monsters in a climactic battle, and he triumphs.

It is the core plot of almost every movie and TV show that features monsters of any kind. The trope goes back to the first stories ever told. Sometimes the hero becomes a monster. Sometimes he is born half monster. Sometimes the monsters are gods. Sometimes the "he" is a "she". It makes little difference. We tell this story over, and over, and we embrace it with fascination.

What is going on here?

The monsters and gods in this myth are Mallory, I think. The hero or heroine is sometimes Mallory's child. Or, someone turned by magic into a "good" Mallory. The hero or heroine is immune to most of Mallory's attacks, and has the power to fight back. In many tellings, the hero gets the girl, who cannot resist his half-and-half charms.

Whether this is realistic or not, it is a compelling fantasy for many. It is a running joke on dedicated Internet forums. Here comes another angst-filled teenager claiming to be a psychopath.

We know from twin studies that psychopathy comes from genes, shaped by environment. If Mallory has children, they inherit half her genes. All humans have some of the genes. Most of us have reason to express those traits at one point or another in our lives.

There are a few questions to ask here:

* Is psychopathy a spectrum? If we have 23% of the psychopathic traits, are we 23% evil?

* Does being part psychopath protect us from Mallory?

* Is there a magical recipe to give us Mallory's powers without turning us evil?

No-one has solid answers to these questions. So we must guess and make hypotheses based on what fits with what we know.

To start with, the question of spectrum. Take the hypothesis that all humans sit on a spectrum. Perhaps it is a bell curve, with most people in the center. At one edge we approach pure evil. At the other edge we approach pure good.

This is hypothesis is easy to falsify. The Mallory's we know do not engage in social acts. If they show charity it is another deception. Every Mallory clusters around the same pole. They vary in ability, age, and circumstance. Yet they are all as close to 100% psychopath as they can be. So distribution of psychopathy is not a bell curve.

Perhaps psychopathy is a temporary thing, with a mental on/off switch. We can certainly switch off our empathy. We will all steal and lie and deceive, if the rewards are high enough. Are we all Mallory in some contexts, and not in others? If we define Mallory as "lacking empathy" then it would seem so.





So can acting like a psychopath can be a defence against hunting predators? Is there benefit in teaching people to act dominant, maintain strong eye contact, dress well, seek luxury and the company of important people, be somewhat rude and arrogant, and feel afraid of nothing and no-one?

There are actually courses that teach people to act like this. However the goal is inevitably to churn out wannabe predators, rather than nice people with better defences. We have speed dating courses, sales seminars, and management schools. Further, I suspect the only people who benefit from such training are psychopaths who missed out when they were growing up.

Here's the thing: predators are territorial. When an animal wants to claim a territory from another, there are two ways the conflict can go. Either there is a clear, visible difference in strength, in which case the more powerful animal takes, or keeps, the territory, without a fight. Or, there two are closely matched, and they fight. The loser leaves before being too damaged, and the winner takes the territory.

Humans do have territory, obviously. However the "territory" that psychopaths aim to control is other people, not land, except insofar as land represents people. No psychopath ever surveyed a fertile valley and thought, "I could plant tons of apple trees here!" Show a bored psychopath a new city, however, and they start to salivate.

So when a psychopath crosses paths with another psychopath, they do what two adult male lions do when they cross paths. They size each other up for relative strengths and weaknesses. They check whether the other has territory worth taking, or is a threat to one's own territory. And then either one slinks away silently, or they fight.

Psychopaths being 100% human have a third option, which is to work together to control a larger territory. There must be a profit motive, and ways to specialize and trade. So, psychopaths work together to build supply chains for human chattel, drugs, weapons, indeed anything that can be bought and sold for large bundles of cash. To find psychopaths working together, look for large scale scams involving a lot of cash, and no reliance on long term credit or reputation. Thus: evangelical churches, investment banks, international sporting associations, the US House of Representatives, and so on.

Smelling and looking like a psychopath attracts the attention of real psychopaths. They may leave you alone, they see you as a threat and attack you, or they may try to work with you (in the sense of trying to cheat you in every single deal). If they do attack it won't be frontal, it'll be an attack on colleagues, friends, or family. At a certain point the psychopath will realize they're not encountering resistance, yet by then there will be irreparable damage.

Despite that risk, mimicking some psychopath traits will definitely ward off at least a slice of the hunting psychopath population. The stronger the traits, the better the general defence, yet the more risk from extreme cases. So there's going to be a cost-benefit sweet spot for psychopath mimicry, if such a thing exists.

So does it exist? Is psychopath mimicry a thing? There are several reasons to believe that it is. First, Walsh's figure of 10% for female narcissists is so much higher than the estimates of psychopathy (1% conventionally, 4% by other counts). Either Susan Walsh is attracting a lot of unwelcome attention, or she is bad at counting, or more than half of female narcissists are psychopath mimics.


The goal with this explanation was to help you observe groups and individuals, before making a conclusion: this person is a psychopath. That is a damning accusation to make. Even professionals get it wrong, quite often. In any case, the diagnosis only makes sense as an answer to pain in some group, or relationship.

In all psychopath relationships, this is the pattern: hide, hunt, seduce, feed, slave, wreck, and move on. Even psychopath parent to child relationships, which have a different dynamic, are essentially seduce-slave-wreck. Let me now take these phases one by one.

The best defence seems to be to want nothing, and accept anything. Rather than developing fear of strangers, to develop love of humanity, including its most difficult individuals. Most of us, however, respond to the psychopath's gaze rather like a drug user.


I asked on Twitter what people wanted to know about psychopaths.

Frank Rousseau asked how to spot psychopaths and deal with them. The main answer is not very helpful. Psychopaths hide like rare predators, in a jungle of fake personalities and lies. You need patience and practice to spot them. Mostly, you can keep doing what you already do. Your ancestral genes already evolved a sophisticated range of psychopath detectors and coping mechanisms, and mostly, these work just fine. That is why psychopaths hover at around 4% of the population instead of 30% or higher.

I believe I'm much better at spotting psychopaths than I used to be. Simply learning that such characters exist, and how they operate, is powerful knowledge. I've had many conversations with people who described people in their past, or present, that were clearly psychopaths.

When conducting a postmortem examination of my own life and career, I can clearly see the psychopaths, now underlined with bright yellow marker. These are the incessant trouble makers, the ones who never made much of value, yet were always at the heart of arguments and disputes.

There are many on-line resources that cover psychopathy, more or less accurately. The best resources I've found are forums where people tell their stories, for it turns out that psychopaths are highly consistent and predictable in their strategies and tactics.

However, as I explained, it seems impossible to diagnose a random person as psychopath without entering into a relationship of some kind with them, or triangulating off sufficient other people who have already gone through that ordeal. You simply cannot tell, based of what you see in front of you.

However, since you are insisting, here is my short guide to "is this person I just met in a bar a psychopath or not?"

* They are genuinely interested in you. They really like you. They make you feel good. They seem almost too good to be true.

* They've interviewed you before you had a chance to focus. They know your background, family situation, availability, income, profession.

* If they talk about their history at all, it's grandiose and spectacular. They can barely keep the sales pitch out of their conversation. You don't notice, do you.

* Things weren't as simple as you thought. He or she is rather "difficult". Yet, you're stubbornly attracted and if anyone criticizes your choices, you reject them.

* You end up planning big projects together, committing suddenly and massively. Everything is urgent. You find yourself rearranging your life around this new person and their needs.

This is all about how this person makes you feel, rather than about them directly. You are flattered, addicted, confused, distracted, protective, and committed. This whirlwind is the sign that you are entering the gates of hell.

How to deal with psychopaths you are already entangled with is another story. I'll cover that in my next article. It is, to put it mildly, not an easy thing.

Frank Rousseau also asked how to help Alice when she seems depressive. You can certainly help a Bob, simply by listening to him and telling him, "it's not you, it's her." However if an Alice comes to cry on your shoulder, you should move to safe distance and then leave. When Alice plays the victim, she is seducing or slaving.

αλεx monadovič asked, how people keep tolerating psychopaths, after their destructive behavior. The answer is, I think, that psychopaths are so good at hiding the bodies. Their new targets see innocence, vulnerability, and opportunity. Psychopaths, like con artists, play to people's weaknesses. Almost everyone has a weakness, and can be exploited.

nomosyn asked, are they necessary? The answer seems to be "yes", for without psychopathy there would be no human culture. That's my theory, at least, and you can falsify it: find me a human cultural activity that is not a plausible psychopath detector.

Lastly, ᴊᴇᴢᴇɴ ᴛʜᴏᴍλs (what's the Unicode fascination?) asked, what their business cards look like. That is an excellent question. I'd suspect, something "sales", or "vice president" of something. It depends on the country. In Europe, even using business cards in 2014 is a highly suspect sign. In South Korea, it's banal.