Predator versus prey
One of the questions raised by the Craigslist Murder was why the suspect might have done it. Silly question, says Kate Harding of Salon, who argues that the suspect currently in custody fits the profile of a sociopathic serial killer perfectly. It’s just that we’re too biased to notice.
one very good reason why a young woman might not be able to believe such a thing of her clean-cut, middle-class, white boyfriend is that every time something like this happens, everybody acts like it’s about the most shocking thing in the world. We somehow forget not only “preppie murderer” Robert Chambers but Ted Bundy, who was famously handsome and charming. We forget that most serial killers are average-looking white dudes no one suspected.
The Salon article’s observation is narrow in its own way. It loses its meaning in societies where the words “clean-cut”, “middle-class”, “white” and even “boyfriend” are undefined, or defined differently. The role bias plays is important but maybe not in the way that Harding thinks. Consider the problem of why we don’t recognize sociopaths more often. A search for terms “sociopath” and “profile” brings up a multitude of articles which attempt to characterize the warning signs of a sociopathic behavior. But if it’s so easy to spot trouble, why do people keep getting into it? How was it, for example, that people didn’t see trouble when they saw Charles Manson?
One reason for the continuing success of killers, I think, is that sociopaths know how to sneak up on people who are blind to them, just as on the Serengeti plain predators come in downwind of their prey. Charles Manson and Ted Bundy knew how to avoid people who would recognize them as threats. They knew how to use filters in their favor. The Craigslist killer, whoever he may turn out to be, may have employed a different approach than that of the classic stalker. He employed ambush predator tactics. An ambush predator’s problem is to find some way to bring the prey to within striking distance so that no escape is possible. Once the Craigslist killer got the victim into that hotel room, they were toast.
So what can we learn from the episode? One lesson appears to be that the new and strange Internet is different. The Associated Press reported that the Connecticut Attorney General called on the popular Internet site Craigslist to stop “pimping and prostitution in plain sight.”
Blumenthal sent a letter to the online community bulletin board on Wednesday, asking the site to immediately eliminate photographs in the “erotic services” section, hire staff to screen images and ads that violate the site’s terms of service and fine those who violate those terms.
But since pimping and prostitution are hardly new activities, what does the CT AG hope to achieve that a sweep of known pickup locations won’t achieve? What exactly are the new elements of danger which the Internet adds to the equation and which have made the case so fascinating? I think the real role of the Craigslist service was to winnow out the careful — people who aren’t stupid or desperate enough to respond to anonymous ads like that — and lure out the vulnerable victim to the waterhole, which in this case were Massachusetts hotels. That way the Ambush Predator could get the easy marks to identify themselves and assure himself of good hunting odds. It’s fascinating to consider the degree to which Internet services effectively create filters which hunters can exploit. The ways in which pedophiles haunt sites frequented by children is well known.
Of course the hunt works in both ways. Counterterror operators and pedophile hunters also use the online space to ambush people looking to hook up. In early 2008, the Australian police busted a worldwide pedophile ring under an operation codenamed Achilles. One of the reasons that convoys were so effective against U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic was it brought the wolfpacks together in one place where they could be destroyed by the escorts. Who is hunting who is a relative thing.
Murderous sociopaths work hard at being charming and to blend into the upper ranks. They know the right language and actions to be socially acceptable. They are also smart and they know it and out think their prey.
It is really hard to identify the murderous sociopaths until after they are caught killing or raping their prey. The fiance ought to thanking GOD she was not his prey but rather some of his protective coloration.
Now if we could get the Authorities to actually preform the job as intended we would see a cause and effect as never seen. But alas we are stuck watching the same tired rerun of political hackery.
Jim
From the wiki link, definition of a sociopath :
“Sociopath’s can be wealthy, have a great history in the work place and have never had any run in with the police. What they do have is the ability to manipulate each situation to where nothing is their fault. They are quick to give praise to someone, but use that as another way to draw them further under their control. They truly have no capacity to believe that anything they have ever done is wrong – even when caught in a bold faced lie”
umm, isn’t it the definition for lots of business bosses ?
otherwise, up to the late years, it was easier to be a predator on the net, as it was a new communications mean with no deontological rules (ethics), or not well respected, also as no police was surveying it, good behaviour depended only on the site’s owners ; commercials did show the path first in tracking people interests and needs, then, through their Ip, to launch advertising ; like in a real society psychopaths (sociopaths) adapted their skill in art of dissimulation to this new “virtual” marcket, anonymity made it even easier and widespread. I believe that our society will have to adapt its laws code to this “2nd life”, before more abuses will occur ; until the late years, only people with a certain grade of education had access to internet, now the new generation with no socilogical evidence that has been bread with internet is operating too, it’s normal to find predators among it, when before they were hunting in the streets.
I still remember when I was younger, arriving in Paris Montparnasse station, how soon I was accosted by weird men and even followed in street, not only in Paris, London and Hamburg too… Torino, Milano too… now, only drugs addicteds are there, though, not in Paris because of the anti-terrorism policy there are intensive police patrols
sounds like a description of many followers of the religion of peace.
Barry, at these times they weren’t any in Paris or european big cities (but spanish, portugese, geecs…) but in mines, surburban manufactures
I’m not to sure that I would put Charles Manson in with this group. He was short, scrawny, malnourished most of the time and when he got excited his voice became tinny and rose an octave. Immediately preceding the Tate-LoBianco murders I knew some people that had actually been out to where the Manson Family lived because they had heard about this new enlightened soul. But once he began talking about provoking a race war and hinting that the ground was littered with shallow graves only the truly damaged remained. Manson may have fooled some of his own followers but my friends and many others had the c*** scared out of them after one visit.
Manson might have well as worn a sign saying “I Plan to Kill” because he fooled no one. While the other killers mentioned here defintely would have left the neighbors scratching their heads wondering why that nice young man did those horrible things.
Ah, at last a topic on Belmont Club of which I have some direct knowledge.
Being a psychiatrist brings one into contact with sociopaths surprisingly infrequently, as they virtually never seek our services for any genuine reason (suffering of some kind). But if one works in jails, as I have, or in a setting where courts may mandate “treatment” (parentheses because no treatment of this condition is possible), as I have, then one runs into a sociopath on occasion.
It is not a pleasant experience. The sociopath does not enjoy being recognized as such, and they can sense immediately being recognized. Charm does not work for them in this situation, so they immediately begin attempted manipulations or threats.
Very unpleasant, and sometimes quite frightening.
Perhaps the most interesting book ever written about sociopathy, Hervey (not a misspelling) Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity” has, unfortunately, long been out of print. This is too bad because I have never read anything better on the subject.
The good news, you can pick up a copy at Amazon for the low price of $999.99!
http://preview.tinyurl.com/dll52d
Jamie Irons
I think people are hard-wired to respond positively to certin kinds of behavior, which are usually classified by too vague to be meaningful terms such as charm, charisma, or confidence. We live in a social world much like the wolves, where certain people take the lead and tell others what to do.
If you tend to have a largely positive regard of a certain type of person, such a person will have an easier time disarming you. And people are most likely to be taken in by somebody like them, e.g. Bernard Madoff. The other option is to trust nobody but that doesn’t work very well either.
The girls who followed Manson were runaways and riffraff off the streets of Venice Beach. They were drug addled and largely unstable themselves. Those times in America were playgrounds for sociopaths and psychopaths. This was the appeal of murderous thugs like Huey Newton and Elaine Brown to white liberals.
O/T Another border dispatch. Yesterday at a park on the southside of Tucson while hundreds of Little Leaguers and families were playing ball, a gangbanger pulled in the parking lot and fired five shots at another gangsta. Fortunately no fatalities just a wound and broken glass. At least due to the efforts of Secretary Napolitano, no crazed veterans were involved.
Thrasymachus makes several very good points in comment #8.
(He made several good points in The Republic, too!
)
It is extremely difficult for us human beings to “tune” our sense of trust to the right level. Being naive, on the one hand, or paranoid, on the other, are not good strategies.
We have a small joke in psychiatry, often repeated: “It’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you.”
Perhaps it would be appropriate for the Obama administration to adopt some paranoia of that variety…
Jamie Irons
From what I remember reading, the woman who was attacked by Markof (accused Craigslist killer) in a Rhode Island hotel, having advertised as a stripper, was saved, most likely from being murdered, when her *husband* intervened. He’d been in the next room.
Setting aside the particular skeeziness of husband-as-pimp, wife-as-hooker arrangement, at least this woman did have a safety system in place. And it appears to have saved her life.
I think the Salon writer’s point is pretty sloppy, due to sloppy thinking on her part. She offers two profiles in the same paragraph which are not the same thing: “clean-cut, middle-class white boyfriend” can be part of, but is not synonymous with, “average-looking white dude.” And Ted Bundy is a poor example of the latter. One of the reasons he is so well-remembered is because he was better than average looking; he was handsome. It was the striking combination of good looks and savagery that caught people’s imaginations (and piqued the horror factor).
And Robert Chambers is not a serial killer. No comfort to Jennifer Levin’s family, for sure. But he, too, does not illustrate Harding’s point about serial killer profiles.
So what *is* her point anyway? That white male serial killers tend to blend in with a population with a lot of while male non-serial-killers, because the former tend to be clever and good at deception?
Duh.
Geez, I hope Salon didn’t actually pay her to write this piece of poorly illustrated non-analysis.
As far as Charles Manson … didn’t Vince Bugliosi claim that his watch stopped when Manson entered the courtroom the first day of trial? (avec carved swastika on forehead, IIRC – now THAT was a giveaway, yes?)
As a fellow psychiatrist I commend Jamie Irons for those insightful points and also commend The Mask of Sanity — an old fashioned but still pertinent book.
Wretchard wrote: Consider the problem of why we don’t recognize sociopaths more often. A search for terms “sociopath” and “profile” brings up a multitude of articles which attempt to characterize the warning signs of a sociopathic behavior. But if it’s so easy to spot trouble, why do people keep getting into it? How was it, for example, that people didn’t see trouble when they saw Charles Manson?
Some additional reasons why people don’t see trouble is that the sociopath uses extremely keen (but evil) empathy to read the needs and reactions of their potential victims. The defenses an ordinary person needs to protect himself against sociopathic manipulation are very costly. To have those shields up all the time diminishes a normal person’s capacity to make trusting attachments with other normal people.
To have ordinary attachments and extraordinary intimacy a normal person must live in a state of basic trust. To protect against a sociopath one must live in a state of suspicion and caution.
By analogy, the concept of “spirituality” is ordinarily assumed to be a good thing, but is really much more complex. The most spiritual event of the twentieth century was the Nurenberg Rallies — evil spirituality at its most extreme. So too the concept of “empathy” is ordinarily assumed to be a good thing. But the sociopath exploits the victim’s empathy and strikes with his own highly refined but evil empathy. Yet normal social relations cannot exist without a fairly high degree of basic trust.
Nice touch by Wrechard to point out that the same tactics that work in the sociopath’s favor can also be used to trap them. Thanks for the discussion.
It is amazing that this sort of thing does not happen more often. Men who have no empathy and lie without flinching do very well with women. In otherwords sociopaths do better iimpressing women than most men whose sensitivity and hesitation makes them look weak.
I was always troubled by men who would ignore a “no” and amazed that so many women were turned on by an agressive man who would not take no for an answer.
I think our CL killer would have done as well or better than Ted Bundy in seducing women to their deaths but he was drawn to the anonymony of the inernet to make his kills. Thank god he was not that smart or he’d still be out there. Had he protected his anonymity by using public systems he’d still be out there.
Charm does not work for them in this situation, so they immediately begin attempted manipulations or threats.
Back in 1984 or 1985, a friend asked me to help him recover $20,000 from a lawyer who promised to invest it while he was raising the rest to go to graduate school in Cornell. That was a fortune for a Filipino family and I had no doubt that they hocked everything that wasn’t nailed down to come up with it. For some reason the fact that I taken a course under Fischer Black meant (in his mind) that I understood finance; which I really didn’t but I went to see the lawyer anyway.
His office was in a run down section of Quezon City called Cubao in the Diamond Building. Anyway, he had a secretary and a few flunkeys out front, and I was ushered in. The lawyer greeted me effusively and after exchanging pleasantries, I asked him where the money was. He explained that he had invested, and I asked with whom and what the return was. He gave nonesense answers, but my dander was up and I pressed him for details. Then — and here’s where it becomes relevant to your point — his face changed amazingly. The smile was replaced with a snarl and he leaned forward and said, “you ask too many questions. I hope you’re careful when you walk out at night.”
The smile remained on his face for about a half second before it was erased. I won’t bore you with the details, but an exciting few minutes ensued after which I left the Diamond building none the worse for wear, though that couldn’t be said of the lawyer, but sadly I was without the $20,000. But I’ve often wondered whether, during that brief period of interaction with the lawyer and his thuggish retainers, whether there wasn’t a flash of mutual recognition between us all. I wouldn’t say that a crook is like a cop; or that a shyster lawyer is the same as an ex-underground something or other; but I think that those who can instantly recognize the low-lifer have something of that quality themselves. Maybe not the moral quality, but the animal one. They say the good die young, but maybe that’s because they embody the best of humanity, whose duty it is for the worst to preserve.
Jamie @ 7 –
AbeBooks has many copies of Cleckley’s book for sale. Prices range from $85 to $700+; the price disparity reflects differences in which edition (there were at least 5 that I notice from skimming) and condition.
Interesting is that one bookseller has a 5th edition copy with personal inscriptions from Cleckley (hence that copy is going for $731.20) … one of which, on the rear flyleaf, Cleckley quotes the final stanza of “Dover Beach,” which we have discussed not too long ago on BC.
But I thought it was an interesting choice of poem, given the subject of Cleckley’s book.
A few follow-up questions to your post, Jamie …
1. You write that sociopaths can sense immediately being recognized. Would you say that this ability to sense being made is part of a sociopath’s above-average (perhaps even superior) “people radar,” as it were? IE, the same sort of antennae that helps the sociopath quickly recognize whom he/she can manipulate, also helps him/her quickly recognize whom he/she *cannot* manipulate ….
2. Are there other professions (besides charming serial killer!) that you have found tend to attract disproportionate numbers of people with superior “people radar”? Does the tendency or desire to manipulate or control come into play in these professions?
3. Why does the sociopath “not enjoy being recognized as such”? By definition, they don’t feel shame or guilt like the rest of us (or is my definition off?) … so what is the bother factor? Realizing that the person who has “made” them can’t be manipulated or charmed, and therefore used?
Bogie,
Good questions, but I only have partial answers.
(1) I do think that sociopaths have better than average “people radar,” at least the “successful” ones do. But there may be others among us, who don’t belong to any diagnostic category at all, who also have such a gift.
(2) Politician!
No, seriously, my wife (who is also a psychiatrist) and I often felt back in the days when we liked him, before the Lewinsky scandal and before we wised up after 9/11, that Bil Clinton was an exemplar of a (possibly mythical) type, the “good” sociopath, who used his manipulative skills for good ends. Well….
(3) See Wretchard’s comment #14.
Jamie Irons
I wouldn’t say that a crook is like a cop; or that a shyster lawyer is the same as an ex-underground something or other; but I think that those who can instantly recognize the low-lifer have something of that quality themselves. Maybe not the moral quality, but the animal one.
Wretchard, I think that Jamie Irons and Batman have illuminated the decisive personality factor: capacity for trust.
Once burned, twice shy. A person who has been victimized in the past (esp. in the arena of a betrayal of trust), or who has witnessed injustice visited upon a loved one, or has experienced a prolonged situation where they have had to be afraid for their own or their family’s safety and therefore exercise extreme caution, will tend not to extend trust as readily as those who have not experienced the above.
When ex-victim meets present-day-con, ex-victim is likely to have their defenses up, more so than not-yet-victim.
I would be fascinated to learn just what past experiences have led us BCers to be inherently distrustful of the current TOTUS. It seems to have been an instinctual thing with almost all of us, and it seems to have been a fairly quick reaction, too. Curious because as a group we have such radically different backgrounds. But almost all of us seem to have a trust issue with this guy, which suggests that the non-sucker radar is probably deployed in our everyday lives as well. Just what brought each of us to have that radar, I wonder?
(With Habu, no need to wonder – it’s an occupational hazard!)
Does Obama fit the criteria of a sociopath?
To wonder why an average-looking guy is hard to recognize as special is to ask the question backwards –it’s because he is hard to recognize that he is average-looking. Also, in USA, most folks are white and half of them are guys, so the typical serial killer has to be an average-looking white guy.
Bogie said
“I think the Salon writer’s point is pretty sloppy, due to sloppy thinking on her part.”
Sloppy thinking at Salon?? Only clarity there is Paglia and then only occasionally.
Better make an appt with Capt Renault.
This text editor for Firefox is nifty.
Listen to any of the current TOTUS’s speeches. Whenever he makes a statement, ask yourself ‘How? How is he or anyone going to accomplish that? That’s not easy and really good people have tried it and failed.’ And then you listen and there is no ‘how’. And you turn off.
Anyone who is a ‘how’ person is immune to Obama.
From what I see of TV “entertainment” these days, if Sociopaths didn’t exist, Hollywood would have invented them. For the last ten years or so about three quarters of the crime dramas I’ve seen involve sociopaths of the sort no one would allegedly expect (except, apparently, a Hollywood producer): the clean cut white guy, especially if he is a businessman. Oh, the horrors.
About forty years ago when I first started going to single bars (and this before they had singles bars), I would notice a boy clearly telling lies to a girl (handing her a line, as we said) and the girl clearly believing the line — not pretending to believe the line, mind you, but believing the line. And these were smart girls, too. A lot of them grew up to be feminist. And having become feminist, they still believed the line. In fact one of the leading predictors of a women falling for hooey from some guy was her taking her feminism seriously (unless she was a lesbian, of course).
So I came to the conclusion that there was a biological imperative for women to believe the line that attractive men threw out while the unattractive men should prepare for a thorough audit. This was based on a limited observational sample, of course.
As for the definition of the sociopath describing business bosses, I must say: not so much in my experience. There are lines of work, I’ve heard, where psychopaths do well: Law and politics being the most obvious. In the case of the law there is a hefty rule book they can follow, unburdened by conscience. Politics provides the opportunity to both write the rules and create a way around them (see campaign finance law). The central lie of politics (especially left politics) is that they are doing “for us” when actually they do “to us” and for themselves. In politics (especially the closed politics of the left) a Sociopath can reach the highest levels. Promulgating the core lie will give the Sociopath a kind of thrill of fulfillment, since this person knows it is a lie while others must fool themselves into believing. In politics, what passes for logic and reason is often just a veneer to give the lie at the core a kind of “truthiness” (see global warming).
In the business environment, the evolutionary principle that is often favored is the establishment of longer lasting bonds. A more instinctively community minded person often has an advantage in that setting. A phsycopath that follows the rule book can keep the game up successefully but don’t tell him (or her) to throw out the rules thinking the situation will improve — it will become a whole lot more arbitrary. A psychopath could do well in a bureaucratic setting — the more “rigid” the better, from their point of view. Following the rules exactly is more comfortable for them when it might drive the rest of us nuts.
The sociopathic business man is more likely the con artist (it is interesting that Hollywood often portrays the grifter in Heroic terms). He would be the ambush predator in a legit, businessman guise. The stimulation and joy comes from fooling and manipulating the victim. But then you have to move on or end up like Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn who, if I remember right, got tarred and feathered. Only in politics can you keep the scam up long term.
When I say that Irony has become a world historical force (the Marxist dialectic run in reverse) it is because “keeping up the scam” requires ironic results (unintended consequences). Think of the person who says, “every time I get my roof repaired, it only leaks worse.” That is an ironic result, is it not? It is the everyday equivalent of “every time they cure our hunger, we starve to death.”
Of course in our day the personal has been made political. And what’s more personal than being a sociopath?
Wretchard,
I wouldn’t say that a crook is like a cop; or that a shyster lawyer is the same as an ex-underground something or other; but I think that those who can instantly recognize the low-lifer have something of that quality themselves. Maybe not the moral quality, but the animal one.
A while back you said something similar along the lines of “takes one to know one” and I vehemently disagreed. But with this minor clarification, I completely agree. I’ve come across several low-grade sociopaths in my life (the Bundy-Manson type are thankfully rare, but there are legions of lesser evils) and wondered that others didn’t see them for who they so obviously were.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about genetic adaptation to civilization, the idea that H. Sapiens Sapiens isn’t a finished product but still in Beta. I wonder if there could be a genetic adaptation that controls socialization analogous to what happens with sickle cell anemia and malaria resistance in West Africa. Get just enough of it and you’re able to function in polite society while still recognizing the more primitive animal behind the camouflaging smile. Get too much and you’re defenseless prey.
You’re an interesting dude, by the way.
PS: for Bogie Wheel’s question about why they don’t like being made, I would assume that although they don’t feel shame, they do feel anxiety. They worry the guy who made them will spook their prey and ruin the ambush.
Re previous comments on trust, ‘radar’, etc: In the “Gulag” Solzhenitzin mentions repeatedly how dangerous it was to trust the wrong people in the jails and camps, meaning informers, thieves and so forth. Doing this could literally be fatal to the prisoner. Yet trusting the right people could be the key to survival in terms of mutual support and aid.
He emphasized that, from the moment he was first imprisoned, he found he had an infallible instinct as to whom he could trust or not, something he never knew he had. He could not account for it except to say that others had it and some did not.
Bogie:
I think the sensitivity to the con has to do with the ability to see the contrasts in character. I grew up in the South. I’ve known Bill Clintons all my life so we had a leg up on the rest. Jimma was transparently Im-going-to-Heaven-and-you’re-not “Chosen”. TOTUS is/was a cipher. Ciphers make alarms go off.
Both Bush’s are, I believe, men of great Character. McCain, demonstrated. Policy differences aside, Hubert Humphrey, Harry Truman, Stevenson, too. MLKJr and Sr, There are plenty on the liberal side.
The ability to detect Character or the lack of it is the real defense.
hdgreene,
In the business environment, the evolutionary principle that is often favored is the establishment of longer lasting bonds.
I think you’re right here, but I also think this is changing in corporate America. Wall Street, and the popular management schools, have focused too much on short term returns. I think the number of sociopaths in the executive suite is rising as a result. I certainly saw that trend during my own extended excursion in the Fortune 500. And it certainly seems that fewer large companies have any sort of design margins.
Herb,
I grew up in the West and have never spent a day of my life in Dixie, but I immediately saw Clinton for what he was. First time I ever saw him on TV, ten seconds into the clip I said “he’s lying.” I didn’t now what he was talking about, didn’t know his name, or that he was running for President. Just heard him speak and knew he was a con man.
Psychiatrist named M Scott Peck wrote “People of the Lie” about the truly evil in the world. Most readable for the Civil Engineer.
Its been my experience that the sociopath doesn’t do well in business for long. The have to move on either to jail or a fresh field.
Buddy and HDGreene,
Superb observations.
Jamie Irons
@14 Wretchard
“He gave nonesense answers, but my dander was up and I pressed him for details. Then — and here’s where it becomes relevant to your point — his face changed amazingly. The smile was replaced with a snarl and he leaned forward and said, “you ask too many questions. I hope you’re careful when you walk out at night.”
The smile remained on his face for about a half second before it was erased. I won’t bore you with the details, but an exciting few minutes ensued after which I left the Diamond building none the worse for wear, though that couldn’t be said of the lawyer…”
I presume that this is your way of saying you kicked his ever-luvin’ @ss. Good on ya, mate!
@ 17 bogie wheel
“I would be fascinated to learn just what past experiences have led us BCers to be inherently distrustful of the current TOTUS. It seems to have been an instinctual thing with almost all of us, and it seems to have been a fairly quick reaction, too. Curious because as a group we have such radically different backgrounds. But almost all of us seem to have a trust issue with this guy, which suggests that the non-sucker radar is probably deployed in our everyday lives as well. Just what brought each of us to have that radar, I wonder?”
Not certain in my case if it was a specific past experience, as much as it was the gradual development of a high functioning people radar for self-defense purposes. As for Obama: The tipped-up chin, the unusual cadences he employs when speaking (sorry, but I can’t quantify exactly why my buzzers go off when I hear him speaking, they just do), facial expressions that just don’t seem normal… perhaps it’s all the rot that came out about the guy when he was running? Heck, anybody who is self-important enough to produce a pair of biographies before he’s accomplished a single thing has GOT to have something twitchy going on, eh?
Back to the subject of people radar – years ago my mother told me that she and my father were rather concerned as I reached school age – “you had no guile whatsoever” is how she explained it – they were worried that I’d be taken advantage of by craftier classmates – and indeed I was. Rather than bore the reader with examples… which besides seems terribly self-indulgent when spread upon someone elses bandwidth… I survived into adulthood, having developed what at a younger age I seemed to entirely lack.
The best part is that it seems the empathetic qualities that so easily offered their possessor up for exploitation are still there, except that they’re suitable protected by a terawatt BS detector.
@25 Herb
“I grew up in the South. I’ve known Bill Clintons all my life so we had a leg up on the rest. Jimma was transparently Im-going-to-Heaven-and-you’re-not “Chosen”. ”
Ditto (South Georgia) – I know exactly what you mean.
@26 JMH
“…I immediately saw Clinton for what he was. First time I ever saw him on TV, ten seconds into the clip I said “he’s lying.” I didn’t now what he was talking about, didn’t know his name, or that he was running for President. Just heard him speak and knew he was a con man.”
Ditto again – no doubt you recall the “I’ve made mistakes in my marriage” interview w/Hillary dutifully, supportively seated by “her man.” Gawd, what a load of codswallop. The ole detector was crackling with energy that day.
JMH,
You wrote:
PS: for Bogie Wheel’s question about why they don’t like being made, I would assume that although they don’t feel shame, they do feel anxiety. They worry the guy who made them will spook their prey and ruin the ambush…
I completely agree but with a quibble.
I don’t think sociopaths feel anxiety in the usual sense.
In fact, there have been many descriptions of the sociopath’s lack of the usual anxiety signals that most of us respond to and, indeed, deliberately provoking situations which would occasion anxiety in normal people in order to “feel something.”
Jamie Irons
…deliberately provoking situations which would occasion anxiety in normal people in order to “feel something” said Dr. Irons.
One wonders, if this trait combined with a taboo against hurting others, would pop out perhaps in self-destructiveness.
bogie wheel:
“2. Are there other professions (besides charming serial killer!) that you have found tend to attract disproportionate numbers of people with superior “people radar”? Does the tendency or desire to manipulate or control come into play in these professions?”
Politicians?
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF
I don’t think sociopaths feel anxiety in the usual sense.
Could it be they don’t feel anxiety for the usual things? Physical safety, social status, etc., those don’t worry them, so they seem oddly disconnected. But a threat to their plans, that’s another story?
Or maybe it’s nothing like anxiety at all. Maybe it’s just them employing whatever methods they think will be effective against the target. Wretchard obviously wasn’t going to be snookered, so the shyster figured bullying might work. Oops, but then there are evil dunces as well as evil geniuses.
triton, had a similar motif goin’ on growing up. Parents warning me i was “too open-minded”. I’d always smile thru that lecture and to end it at the right time would simply agree open-mindedly with everything they’d just said.
I wonder if today’s environment of extreme pop culture beyond where everyone will receive 15 minutes of fame but demand it at a younger and younger age, fame long before it is earned. Pop culture is the perfect breeding ground for the new-age sociopath. Nobody is humble enough to start at the bottom, one must grab headlines even if it is to be a short-lived death.
I rue the day when the generation of sociopaths run the bureaucracies that must answer to budgets and the great society must decide promotion or death of its aged. Triage is the right of state because it is the best for the most. Is there inherent right to life or shall we euthanize the children of the ‘nation no longer under god’, which is the best remedy for a society that can not longer afford its pensioners? In a free world, it would not permissible to ask and who is to say which is less just, a society planned by an elite class for its own survival or the tenacity of the free individual to live untethered and by natural law?
Absolutely, completely OT, even for me:
Why is Homeland Security, et al, not testing or restricting travelers from Mexico into the United States, given that a national health emergency has been declared? Are they out of their everlovin’ politically correct minds?
…I think that those who can instantly recognize the low-lifer have something of that quality themselves. Maybe not the moral quality, but the animal one.
I am reminded of Churchill’s prescience in recognizing the danger that Hitler represented well before most others, indeed while many other intelligent and world-aware people were proclaiming him a visionary man of the future.
In important ways Churchill and Hitler were polar opposites. But perhaps in the most essential and, arguably, important way they were cut from the same cloth.
I rue the day when the generation of sociopaths run the bureaucracies that must answer to budgets and the great society must decide promotion or death of its aged. Triage is the right of state because it is the best for the most.
Annoy Mouse, I’ve had a couple of brief conversations with women (men aren’t quite as interested) about the Obama Administration proposal to basically ration — or even deny — treatment in certain cases. It’s an obvious “slippery slope” and yet they were very much for it (pointing out the potential cost of keeping the aged alive). At the same time, they would not believe that insurance companies could sell policies where certain lines of treatment were not covered or the financial liability of the insurance company was in any sense limited. But when it came to a hard set of rules from which no ordinary person escapes (the privileged, of course, will always be with us), they are for that with no questions asked.
I think history clearly shows that powerful bureaucracies tend towards behaviors that are psychopathic in nature — looking out for the welfare of the institution first and manipulating empathy, feelings, and coercion to get their way. This applies even when those leading the government desire good results and are not themselves sociopaths, so how much worse will it be when they are?
Alex from Tocqueville said that people favor equality over freedom. Equality is certainly easier to provide than freedom, even though it is often much harder to actually live (remembering that the privileged few will always be among us).
Dr. Irons, thank you for you kind words. I must admit that my own feelings towards Bill Clinton mirrored your own. But I did not vote for him because of that “central character flaw,” shall we call it. Still, he might turn out to have been better than the current NIC (Narcissus in Chief).
On recognizing sociopaths…
I don’t think it requires sociopathy, but it DOES require a recognition that darkness resides in everybody. One of the horrible consequences of modernity is the proposal that humans are perfectable, or can be remade. This claim feeds on what I regard as a near universal yearning for (lacking a better term) Eden. People WANT to be perfectable. But we aren’t.
How, then, to trust others? I think it requires a longstanding social network. The folks who isolate themselves, or fall into the “wrong crowd” are crippled gazelles at the water hole.
I think that one of the great difficulties in thinking about the Craigslist Killer is that it is difficult for most of us to think of criminal activity as anything but insanity.
Eating raw oysters or having commercial erotic transactions with women in hotels sounds rather nuts to me. And both of them can result in death. No doubt that for many people flying around in 63 year old airplanes when you have no particular place to go sounds just as nuts. And it can result in death, too, but I was just sitting on my back porch wishing I was doing just that.
So the Craigslist Killer must be nuts, as well as some shyster bilking people out of their money, regardless if he is a Filipino in Manila or a Jewish guy in New York. It is hard for many of us to admit that the shysters are not nuts but just running on a different set of internally consistent rules.
So in the case of the Craigslist Killer, he must be nuts and therefore sick and should be cured instead of a visit to Old Sparky. It is easy to believe in crazy people because we see so much that seems crazy. It is much harder to believe that someone is playing by a different set of rules.
We see this internationally as well. Obama and his ilk like to think that Iran and the Taliban are just playing by a different set of rules. But maybe they are just foreign versions of the Craigslist Killer. Maybe the rules they play by make them nuts, or at least indistinguishable from it.
HD-
Eagle don’t flock and bulls don’t herd. The cows have always consciously followed the biggest bull and care less about the fate of the failed suitors along the way. It is perfectly acceptable that the males fight to the death for a right to reproduce even if it is done so with less consequence in modernity. Men are many and so of little intrinsic value. Sperm’s aplenty and eggs must be protected. So it is for the queen bee. It is the health of the herd that must be attended to by the strongest organizing force. See where the courts fall on 99% of confrontations between males and the tyranny of a effeminate statist bureaucracy. There will be blood.
“It is hard for many of us to admit that the shysters are not nuts but just running on a different set of internally consistent rules”
Reminds me of; “If the rule you followed lead you to this, of what use was the rule?” – Anton Chigar (sociopathic killer [No Country for Old Men])
Rules are for those who love family or who fear anarchy. Leaves alot of room for the outliers.
Last sunday there was a very interesting report on a person (highly educated) who acknoledges himself as “psychopath” and what is shown reflects what the “experts” have said on this board, but with more details and explanations
video (french interview, Israeli cobaye that speaks english)
http://tinyurl.com/cmt4fb
http : // plus7 .arte .tv/fr/detailPage/1697660,CmC=2574322,scheduleId=2538750.html
hdgreene — Women love rationing the way they love aristocracies and nobility. A woman who thinks she’s “charming” or sexually attractive can always get her way (or thinks she can). Older women under no delusions generally oppose such rationing knowing they will get the short end of the stick. Having ample experience in being invisible.
Women CONSTANTLY overestimate their sex appeal, it’s power, and particularly it’s duration.
As for the Salon article, it’s full of the typical female hatred for the “Beta Male” (all men are dull, boring psychopaths) and in deep denial about women’s attraction to killers.
Ted Bundy, OJ, Drew Peterson, Scott Peterson, Johan Van Der Sloot, never lacked for female companionship precisely BECAUSE women knew they were killers. THAT’S WHY THEY WERE WITH THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Take for example Drew Peterson. Everyone knows it’s a slam-dunk he murdered two of his wives. The man has College coeds all over him. BECAUSE he’s a killer. Women are hard-wired for this. Men who display their killer nature, more or less openly, are irresistible to women. Not all women, of course, but most of them.
This is something women don’t like to admit, but is nevertheless politically incorrectly true. A “hate fact” but true. Women (ala the Salon Article) like to say all serial killers are dull, boring drones and justify their innate, hard-wired attraction to killers (and deep hatred/aversion to boring “beta” men), likely dating from the Agricultural Age when sociopathic killers could command great resources. Hunter-gatherer types tend to have less of the sociopaths because there’s little barrier to having someone stick a spear into you if pressed. And even the best hunters come up empty at times.
Men can be taken by greed, envy, hatred, but sexual attraction to violent men is generally not one of them. Sociopaths like Bundy or Peterson or the Craigslist killer tend to get men’s backs up, as a threat, since most men are descended from kill or be killed men who in turn are hard-wired to suss out threats and alliances. “Kill this man or befriend him in alliance?” Since every man is in competition with every other man for the limited pool of attractive and available women, it’s a totally different dynamic.
This accounts for Obama’s support and opposition, and Palin’s support and opposition. Women LOVE Obama, he’s the classic big man and men don’t like him, for the same reason. Women HATE Palin, she’s a threat to the female model of Big Man aristocracy personally and culturally, while men like her. Hotair had cross-tabs on the latest polls, Palin vs. Obama had a margin for Obama around 12 points for women, and a margin of 11 points among Men for Palin.
In short I think the Craigslist killer was quite well known among men and women as a killer, and it accounted for his fiancee in the first place. The man quite likely has few male friends I’ll predict.
What twigged me to TOTUS? 1) Far too many years with a spouse who (I now realize) demonstrated some sociopathic tendencies; 2) *Two* autobiographies? That’s a remarkable ego even for a politician; and 3) At least 75% of it was simply that he’s a Chicago Democrat politician (by definition a grifter and a predator) making a zillion unfulfillable promises, none of which would “grow” the country and many of which could bring it down. I will never understand why so many people didn’t see what we at BC saw so clearly.
Bob Kerrey once said to some reporters, “Bill Clinton is an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you understand that?” No, they didn’t. Pretty reliable that way, reporters.
Even Ted Bundy’s “profile” was synthetic. He concocted his psychological issues for sympathy.
There are millions of somewhat pathetic men with overbearing mothers, bed-wetting shame, love of porn and hookers… They compensate by working hard and dressing nice. No large number of them ever dream of harming or killing women.
@35 buddy larsen
I can visualize the exact situation you describe…
…. makes me grin as I think back…
Triton
RWE/41; first, re 63 yr old airplanes, warbirds being a hobby of mine i have to o/t ask which one?
also, re ‘nuts’ –it’s no trick at all for these types to get honestly –that is, sans theater –to the top of hierarchies: whether murdering a prostitute, sending human waves of conscripts into machine gun fire, or boxcarring to the gas chambers a continent’s intelligentsia, he sees himself as nature’s agent, martyring his otherwise normal self to the higher calling of evolution toward utopia, and necessarily oblivious (though “it pains him” probably) to any individual’s suffering. The horror (‘our’ horror) at the heart of it is, examined in pure secular logic, his point of view is not under but over rational: “we all die in the end, so the goal of life must be death, so all i’m doing is helping civilization make progress”.
what can any secular therapy ever do with such?
I always believed that Bill Clinton is and was sociopath. He just had limits to what he would not go. Not all sociopaths are a murderous danger to society.
Obama, I do not believe is a sociopath, he is more ideological and a narcissist
@51 RAH
Presuming Juanita spoke the truth… (and I tend to believe she did)
“…might want to put some ice on that…”
I agree completely – a normal, caring person couldn’t be so callous.
cjm @33…
Thanks.
The good doctor writes of such players as being not so common.
How then to explain why I run into them all of the time?
Bill Clinton is a classic sociopath but he has limits, his wife and daughter. One of the charcteristics is a sense of superiority and that he/she an talk or maipulate their way out of anything.
He felt that way about the impeachment and he was right. Boldness will often favor the bold, both Bill and Barak know that.
Note that Bill will not have anything to do with Barack as Barak is a competitor in a way that men recognize.
Large ambitions is a classic sign of narcissim and politicians have to have that to grab power.
I find it intereting that it is Cheney that is showing up and contesting Barack when he lies about the Bush administration. Bush has been able to resist that urge. Bush’s major problem was that he allowed lies to flourish and only focused on a few items.
Barack is butterfly and flits from issue to issue. Whether that is good or bad I am not sure.
@ 46 At some point you’re going to have to accept that women don’t want to be bonnet-clad pioneer/prairie wives. Further, not loving sulky possessive betas doesn’t indicate that she wants an alpha to murder her.
If in fact she would rather be with a jerk and potential killer, then what does that say about the others whom she won’t even consider? You place the error on her judgment as if she doesn’t know her own thoughts, dreams, and feelings, or hasn’t the right to any of those.
Maybe girls like to be young and foolish, compared with crusty old men anyway. You must know it’s their birthright. Unless you are Taliban!
If someone else mentioned this before then I apologize but it appears that The Mask of Sanity is now in the public domain and can be downloaded here;
http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF
The drawback is that it is indicated as 485 pages which might cause some printers some problems.
@ a thousand bucks, you’d think you could buy an actual mask of sanity instead of just a book about one.
#37 programmer
When SARS was first recognized in China and before the scope of the Toronto outbreak was recognized, your question (about travel restriction) was asked at a CDC press conference.
“The most important thing, the most important job we have, is to avoid stigmatization of travelers and migrants” was the answer.
You will never in your lifetime see international travel restrictions imposed to control epidemic disease. To those in charge, it is literally an unthinkable thought.
hdgreene @ 22:
“About forty years ago when I first started going to single bars (and this before they had singles bars)….”
2009-40=1969
Close enough.
I recall a Club at Ft. Story in Va Beach that was one of those. In fact if I rack my brain enough I can remember all six of such clubs in the Hampton Roads area at the time. (Six because you coud hit a diff’t one every nite) And the boys telling those lies were the Airedales and those of us expecting audits were the ordinary line types.
“If in fact she would rather be with a jerk and potential killer, then what does that say about the others whom she won’t even consider?”
You are absolutely right. Women are correct to find the better breadwinner in the abusive sociopath. It is also OK being a 45year old little girl and to predate on children and it is OK to punish men who reach outside of their social caste, especially if they are crusty and old anyway. Only a Taliban could argue otherwise.
Buddy,
(Comment #58)
You are in rare form, as always!
(Not rare for you!)
Jamie Irons
Having grown up with at least one immediate family member who was mentally ill, I know whereof crazy looks like.
But this person was not bad. Just crazy.
I also have one immediately family member who is both bad AND crazy. So I know whereof that looks like, too.
Having seen these two varieties of human up close & personal, I deduce that the other two varieties are just as real, making for four in total:
Neither bad nor crazy
Crazy, but not bad
Bad, but not crazy
Both bad and crazy
I agree with RWE that too many modernists want to attribute to insanity what is just downright evil, since they, and our culture at large, have mostly lost both the vocabulary for and the ability to apprehen evil.
These people probably have no firsthand experience with crazy, either. Because if they did, they would know how to tell one from the other.
Wot sheltered little hothouse flowers.
buddy @ 58 – funny. But then you realize that to all the people who really matter, insanity is just oh-so-much-more exciting. Splains a lot, doesn’t it?
This conversation illustrates my own point when trying to refute the common leftist trope: “America (or American foreign policy) causes terrorists.”
It is hard to know what makes a murderer, a terrorist murderer, a suicide murderer tick. You can’t just point to one cause (American foreign policiy) and say, “See? No wonder he’s a murderer.” In fact we really don’t know what makes them tick. That the left would extend unlimited equanimity to the murderer while staying the avenging sword reveals the huge difference between the right and the left.
The left would see America itself as the cause for terrorism. Something like “going postal” on an international scale – “going American!” Blam! But it is all much more complicated than that. That the left is so satisfied with such simple tropes tells me not that they are dumb but rather, non-thinking.
And the boys telling those lies were the Airedales and those of us expecting audits were the ordinary line types.
A West Coast version of this was probably what I witnessed at El Toro when I went there in the 90s for a couple of Dad’s squadron reunions. Friday cocktail hour at the O Club. Marine pilots, still in their flight suits, gorilla-glued to Bar Bunnies in *their* uniforms: big hair, sheath dresses, stilletto heels, slabs of Lancome.
If you’re a beta (and 90%+ of us are, right?), once you get over the personal frustration factor, it makes for an interesting anthropological study.
Upthread Mr. Fernandez noted the matter of the slippage of the mask when the psycho was exposed.
I think it’s a relaxation of the cover. An exposure of the real face. I expect it takes a lot of effort to keep the socially acceptable face on on a daily basis, given the nastiness behind. Like Bill when the Temper takes over.
I think that Franken will show us some really scary faces after his election theft is over. I think that boy has a couple too many turns on the capstan.
Bogie Wheel #63:
You get my point, but it is not just “modernists” but nominally same people in general who take this view. Evil inevitably looks like Insanity. The Nazis look like the insane from our perspective. So does Pol Pot. And yes, there are insane people that are to be only pitied and those who are a terrible nuisance and those who deserve three rounds in the back of the head in some empty cornfield and nothing more.
But it is true that a great many people wish to think there is no Evil but instead just a different viewpoint, even one which might be equally valid. When Pres Reagan made his Evil Empire speech some people were horrified and others guffawed. And then on one day in August 1991 the Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Russia stood there in front of the Russian parliament building – a building newly saved by tanks that had first approached menacingly and then turned around to defend it – and said “The Soviet Union was not a Union. It was an Evil Empire,” while some of those who laughed at Reagan giggled nervously.
Buddy: Ercoupe 415C. Not a warbird, although there were a few that were.
#46 Whiskey,
“since most men are descended from kill or be killed men who in turn are hard-wired to suss out threats and alliances. “Kill this man or befriend him in alliance?” Since every man is in competition with every other man for the limited pool of attractive and available women, it’s a totally different dynamic.
In short I think the Craigslist killer was quite well known among men and women as a killer, and it accounted for his fiancee in the first place. The man quite likely has few male friends I’ll predict.”
“The Roots of Empathy and Compassion
Our early ancestors would not have survived the brutal conditions of cave-dwelling existence had they not cooperated and cared for one another. There is evidence that primitive humans took care of the ill and infirm among them. People looked after one another to increase their chances of survival, and they would not have done so if the majority had not been endowed with a sense of responsibility and the capacity for empathy. Those with a conscience would have taken better care of their children and other family members, and so those carrying similar genetic material would have been more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce, thus carrying on the genetic lineage that favours a conscience.
The evolutionary roots of empathy can be seen in the behaviour of many animals, particularly among our close cousins, the bonobo monkeys. Primatologist Frans de Waal offers the touching story of a female bonobo who cared for an injured bird. The bird, having crash-landed in her enclosure, was unable to fly. The bonobo gently stretched out its wings and gave it a light toss. When this didn’t work, she carried it to the top of a tree and sent it sailing to the ground. The bird was still unable to fly, so the bonobo sat with it, comforting and protecting it until it had recovered sufficiently to fly out of the enclosure. Those who work with animals have witnessed many incidents suggestive of empathy, and among the more intelligent animals, these may cross species boundaries, indicating that compassion is part of the basic nature of most intelligent beings.
The existence of the emotions that lead to the development of a conscience—anxiety, empathy, shame, and guilt, increase the chances of both individual and group survival, as well as the survival of one’s offspring. Thus, having a conscience is useful. However, there are situations in which conscience can be overridden in all but the most psychologically strong individuals.”
http://personalitydisorders.suite101.com/
umm, whiskey, it might be your experience, but fortunately reality has other shemas, while a strong male, psychopath or successful character, often gets female attention, though females that get trapped are more than often “blondes”, it’s not knowing that women also have the sense of race preservation and caring, they, for the long term, would choose a man who can fullfil empathy and protection.
Also in the gender attraction phenomen, something that is almost forgoten though humans as mamalians still perspire pheromons that our culture managed to blur, though some studies say that they still fonction, why should a woman fall in love with one man rather another one in a given profile definition ? often the type we say that we fancy the most as image, in reality looses all his virtual attraction power, “Chemistry” harmony is the key, even if we are not conscient of that.
We have a popular sentence when we want to express our disgust ” I can’t smell him/her” !
“The evolutionary roots of empathy can be seen in the behaviour of many animals”.
What can not be seen in many animals is the total resentment of being the vessel of birth. You can see a lot of behaviors in nature but there are no thriving species that has rebelled against procreation or gender roles. Ya know, gender roles. Those made up by ‘icky old men’. You see, a male can be a mommy and a bull dike can be more of a man. It is all made up and god was a sentimental old sexist pig.
For those who are interested, CBS has posted a 41-minute video about the Craigslist case on its 48 Hours website:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/48hours/
The video includes an interview with a psychiatrist who thinks Markoff is a spree killer, i.e. one who just “snapped” for some reason. Don’t know whether or not Dr. Irons will agree with this evaluation.
Whiskey may be interested to know that one person interviewed who thought there was something wrong with Markoff is a female former classmate, and one of his present defenders is a male classmate. Said classmate maintains Markoff has always had male friends.
das/64; re ‘going postal’, you could refine the berserker taxonomy with ‘going coastal’ (organisms which are politically self-destructing but don’t know it yet).
If postal and coastal are ‘A’ and ‘B’, ‘C’ would be ‘going coastal-postal’ (organisms as crazy as they can get).
‘C’s who are not yet institutionalized could be monitored by a worried nation via watching NBC (Nothing But ‘C’s)
dangerously deteriorating NBC’s (symptoms of excess wailing) would be tranquilized immobile and kept in gated enclosures as far away from ordinary people as possible, i.e. the continental margin, the “beach”, and be referred to as “beached wails”.
72, LOL, buddy!
MC,
We have a popular sentence when we want to express our disgust ” I can’t smell him/her” !
Does not make sense in English. The meaning would be: “He/she doesn’t seem to have any smell”, or “Something is wrong with my olfactory proboscis as he/she is concerned”.
I bet the meaning is “I can’t stand his/her smell.”
To: #71 Buddy
Hey, you and Jamie Irons are my all time favorite web commentators but you kind of lost me on that one…does “C” the “coast” represent the “left coast” as it were…? I guess I’m just a meat and potatoes guy after all…cheers…
#74 thanks, that the right sentence
Das/75
A = coastal
B = postal
C = A + B = coastal-postal
“coast” is “left-coast”
How’bout them potatoes now?
Wretchard,
Re: #14. Excellent. Once upon a time I came to the fork in the road. I chose to be a sheep dog. Why? I just didn’t like smelling like a wolf. I didn’t like leaving a wolf’s trail.
Why does the sociopath “not enjoy being recognized as such”? By definition, they don’t feel shame or guilt like the rest of us (or is my definition off?) … so what is the bother factor? Realizing that the person who has “made” them can’t be manipulated or charmed, and therefore used?
Because you now know you’re enemy and you know you have an enemy. That is a danger to the sociopath. Sociopaths know sheep dogs will not only defend the flock against wolves. They will also try to injure or kill the wolf if they can.
==
These days it looks to me like the sheepdog to wolf ratio is inadequate. It is too late to stop the bad. The question is: can we prevent the worst? As in all things human: “it will be a close run thing.”
Women CONSTANTLY overestimate their sex appeal, it’s power, and particularly it’s duration.
Yes, which is why we CONSTANTLY see movies (made by SWPL yuppies and women, remember) in which 60-year-old actresses are getting it on with 30-year-old actors, and HARDLY EVER the reverse.
Look, the clueless folly of the I-still-wanna-be-27-even-though-I’m-54 specimens runs both ways.
Take for example Drew Peterson. Everyone knows it’s a slam-dunk he murdered two of his wives. The man has College coeds all over him. BECAUSE he’s a killer. Women are hard-wired for this. Men who display their killer nature, more or less openly, are irresistible to women. Not all women, of course, but most of them.
Do there exist women who are fascisti-bootlicking sadists drawn to violent men precisely because of their demonstrated violence?
Sure.
Is this “most” women?
Sheesh.
I can think of at least one other motivation that explains the girl-goes-for-bad-guy story. She thinks she can change him. In other words, badly misplaced empathy. Naivety. Idealism. The need for significance. The female version of the rescue fantasy.
And I suspect this probably drives way more women into the arms of dangerous guys than does the “honey, can I watch while you beat up some metrosexuals” mentality.
Oh yeah. There’s also the girl who goes for Unsavory Guy not “BECAUSE he’s a killer” … but just cuz he tweaks off her parents. Give her the purple-haired poet-loner over the bully who runs bloodfesty dogfights out of his basement any day.
So, a couple of alternative explanations right there. And I’m sure there are others.
In other words … the 150 million+ females who comprise slightly more than half of the American population are, whadda ya know, not Borg-brained bimbos. They are, whadda ya know, individuals. Are there trends? Yes. Deep-seated bio-cultural motivations? Sure. But there’s no unified field theory of female behavior.
Das (#75),
You wrote:
>>>Hey, you and Jamie Irons are my all time favorite web commentators…
I am honored. Now, I can understand your enjoying Buddy’s comments (“beached wails” indeed!) but I have to question your judgment in my case…
Jamie Irons
Once upon a time I came to the fork in the road. I chose to be a sheep dog. Why? I just didn’t like smelling like a wolf. I didn’t like leaving a wolf’s trail.
I wonder whether you can leave the wolf completely behind; its specter will follow in your dreams. You’ll see it at the edge of the light; glimpse it flitting through the shadows out of the corner of your eye. Maybe this is because for much of human history, leadership belonged to the alpha wolf. Being a chieftain in the old days resembled being the leader of a gang. I think a modern street gang chieftain or even a mafiosi would recognize an old time clan leader at first glance. The jewelry; the retainers, the retinue of women. What did you need to lead in the days of Beowulf but physical courage, cunning, intelligence; maybe even psychosis. The children of kings routinely fought each other until only one line survived.
Today we define success in other terms. You can for example, be a successful dentist. You make a lot of money, live in a big house and deliver learned lectures at conventions on the subject of cavities and gum disease. But although a dentist may be a good father and a pillar of the community; although he’s brought happiness and comfort to more people than the alpha wolves of old, how often do we find women drawn, almost compulsively to the “bad boys”; the people who in former times would be kings but who are now simply the lords of the shadows? I think that on the whole human progress requires that we make the transition from a society led by wolves to one led by fathers and mothers. The wolf truly does belong in the shadows. But a curious thing happened along the way: the sheepdogs were cast into the outer dark too. By some instinctive process the regular people understood that the wolves and the sheepdogs were cousins under the skin. And they suffer the same taint; and are equally shunned by those whose hackles are raised by their proximity.
But there’s a hitch. The wolves are still out there, circling in the dark. Society cannot be led by wolves any more. But can it live without the sheepdogs?
Bogie,
I can think of at least one other motivation that explains the girl-goes-for-bad-guy story. She thinks she can change him. In other words, badly misplaced empathy. Naivety. Idealism. The need for significance. The female version of the rescue fantasy…
You are precisely right about this.
My wife, who is the most amazing woman, with a superb sense of humor, a couple of years ago came up with an idea, which still makes us laugh, for a Fox Network “reality” show, which would be called “Basket Case.”
The basic idea would be that four or five carefully chosen, attractive and intelligent women contestants would compete to “fix” an obvious and hopeless loser male, physically attractive himself as all get out, but clearly destined for minor things, a complete f***up, but in the eyes of the contestants only requiring a little tweaking here and there to blossom into the winner he was always really destined to be.
Now, of course, males are also vulnerable to the rescue fantasy. We are all vulnerable to it.
Jamie Irons
Wretchard (#81),
Wonderful comment.
It seems to me that much of what we are struggling with derives from a failure, on the part of a major portion of our population and especially in our political class, to appreciate that “[t]he wolves are still out there, circling in the dark…”
And what is all the hullabaloo about “torture” and torture but an attempt to hamstring the sheepdogs?
Jamie Irons
The wolf truly does belong in the shadows. But a curious thing happened along the way: the sheepdogs were cast into the outer dark too. By some instinctive process the regular civilians understood that the wolves and the sheepdogs were cousins under the skin. And they suffer the same taint; and are equally shunned by those whose hackles are raised by their proximity.
John Ford expresses something very similar to this theme in both “The Searchers” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Ford sees the frontier as wolf-world — a place of extreme violence, predation, and lots of casualties. Sheepdogs (always John Wayne’s character, of course) have blood on their muzzles just like the wolves do. And, to a sheep, a sheepdog looks and acts rather like a wolf. The sheep, being a sheep, would not know what’s going on in the sheepdog’s brain, that the sheepdog, unlike the wolf, is wired to be a protector and not a predator.
In Ford’s movies above, when civilization is eventually, at hard cost, won, there is no place for John Wayne’s character. In “The Searchers,” Ethan stands outside the cabin (in his Harry Carey tribute pose) while everyone else goes inside, and eventually Ethan turns and walks away … back to the wilderness. In “Liberty Valance,” he never takes credit for killing Valance (the territorial menace), loses his girl to the greenhorn lawyer, and dies a poor and mostly forgotten man.
Civilization rests on Tom Doniphon’s back. But nobody knows his name.
@81 Wretchard
“But there’s a hitch. The wolves are still out there, circling in the dark. Society cannot be led by wolves any more. But can it live without the sheepdogs?”
Easy: NO
The American left has never known anything but freedom and democracy – therefore they can believe themselves in a world where the Castros just want to bring health care to the people, that’s all, what’s wrong with providing good health care to the poor, a world where fellow citizens who might worry a tad about security, especially after 9/11 are right wing nuts, a world where terror is in the eye of the beholder, a world where true socialism has never really been tried, in short, a world without circling wolves…
The wolves are still out there, circling in the dark. Society cannot be led by wolves any more. But it can it live without the sheepdogs?
I suspect that it cannot, especially when the fantasy of the moment is that the wolves wouldn’t have been our enemies except for the presence of the sheepdogs.
Marie Claude, you make an optimistic case for empathy based on evolution. To put it more cynically, yet no different in essence, the primal reason that smallish men tend to resent women is not because women are wicked and wild hurricanes. The smallish men are just mad that girls steal all of their boyfriends away.
Romance (whether classy or cheap) means no more “Our Gang” for boys. No more A-Team, no more blood-brothers forever. And all you had to do was show a little skin and be cute. It’s no wonder certain males go off the wall when they lose their best buddy to this. That’s basically what all this “women suck!” foot-stomping is about that we see in this thread.
I think you’re right here, but I also think this is changing in corporate America. Wall Street, and the popular management schools, have focused too much on short term returns.
I have been hearing this complaint for over seventy years. And I’m only 64.
The very best book on why girls go for bad guys is the novel The War Lover.
It is a very exciting war/love story. So it entertains as well as informs.
I wonder whether you can leave the wolf completely behind; its specter will follow in your dreams.
Well no. It never leaves. But it helps. I can still recognize an easy score. If I’m a friend to the scoree I will warn. Other wise I just pass it by. Not my thing. To be a better sheepdog it helps to think like a wolf.
But I do like doing project management with small teams. I have been told on occasion that I’m not too bad at it.
“you make an optimistic case for empathy based on evolution”
call it evolution if that conforts you, but so far humans were not a spontaneous generation ! you wouldn’t believe that they even were artists, some metro-sexual sheepdogs left carvings and paintings in caverns, and guess, they also represented women with signs of reverrence, as being fertile like mother earth. umm don’t tell me that this is a new age conspiracy.
the craiglist murderer doesn’t fit your theory
he obsessely look for a specific sort of women, those that sell their service as “massage”, and one knows what that means, even with camoufflage. So I suppose that the guy didn’t want to brainstorm himself (or to waste time) in seducing a non professional. By focusing directly on a target that had no envy to be courted too, so that shows there that both knew for what they were going to meet, a “commercial contrat”, with an advantage for the bad guy, he also knew that he will kill the girl for money, (that she earned quite well with such a profession). I don’t think that his victims admired him for his nice looking or special strengh, even as a paper tiger talker !
After reading all the stuff on the women here, I have the impression that some hold us not more than a Taliban would, beyonds that, some would like that we tell them how great, how strong, how courageous they are ! I don’t care, if it is for the household peace ! LMAO
Sorry to tell you, but Karnaval warriors ain’t fashionable anymore, sportmen and popstars get the credit now, umm, the blondes ! and the most advised would choose the “richests”, actually I have read that there are courses that teach how to hunt a rich man in your country, inenvisageable here (umm because of the “smell” thing
)
Now, tell me how Sorao’s wife is ?
I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.
Tommy by Kipling
The sheepdogs just need to hang on until the band begins to play. And with the current fools at the helm it won’t be long.
You see, a male can be a mommy and a bull dike can be more of a man.
It happens. That is not the way to bet.
“The Searchers” syndrome, Kipling’s Tommy, The Viking Berserkers unwelcome in the village market in peacetime, all that, is in our foundational myth, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, in the person of Sir Lancelot, the greatest warrior, the finest friend, the handsome and hale fellow of the Great Hall –and the secret seducer of the wife of the King, his best friend.
he is not a real villain for it, tho, and neither is Guinevere, because there is no ambition or greed but only too much of Love. Love, invisible and unpredictable, comes to free your spirit only to, about half the time, murder it. You’re lucky if you’re lucky.
twoby –thanks –that was it –Malibu.
I see that two people have beat me to pointing out that “The Mask of Sanity” is available online. I found it about a week ago, after having been curious about it since the 1970s. I’ve only skimmed some of it, so my present take on it might be wrong, but it looks to me like Cleckley is saying that the majority of psychopaths/sociopaths are not of the very evil kind; they steal from their families and others at times, and they get themselves into trouble; their conception of self is grandiose but not delusional, since often they are quite skilled or educated in what they claim, but not to the degree that they claim or imply by their behavior; e.g., a former featherweight boxer who would pick fights with heavyweights (outside the ring). I have the impression that they think of themselves as royalty “borrowing” from the peasants when the reason is “important.”
If my take on it is right, this is just a bit surprising to me, since I had thought nearly all of them weren’t far from great evil.
I remember precisely when I saw Bill Clinton’s true self– “I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale…”
I thought, anyone who can believe a lie that blatant is truly a fool. It turns out there were a lot of fools in America. I think the truth is really that they wanted to believe the lie because they wanted to believe he would solve all the country’s problems.
The same kind of logic that leads women to date men who are willing to cheat on their wives for them only to be shocked, shocked I tell you, to find out they themselves were cheated upon. Some will even marry a man who cheated on his wife and expect him to be faithful. Like Simon above said, “It happens. That is not the way to bet.”
“But a curious thing happened along the way: the sheepdogs were cast into the outer dark too.”
This angle, The Searchers, Jhn Wayne, et al, reminds me of “The Seventh Samurai”. In the end, joy can only be felt by the sheep.
good and evil seem like hot and cold. we think of hot or cold inside a narrow peculiar band around our body temps, and don’t really have to much think on the vasty cold universe that dwarfs our tiny little point of heat to near oblivion, and keeps it working hard to keep out of the embracing great default state of deep freeze.
@29 Triton’sPolarTiger
I have perceptions of Obama very similar to yours, re tipped-up chin, unusual cadences, facial expressions that don’t seem normal, and my buzzer going off. I simply could not understand why anyone would vote for him. He might or might not be a sociopath, but that’s beside the point of whether some people have better “radar” for sociopaths and the like, and what accounts for it. I wouldn’t dare to say that my radar was very good, simply because there’s nothing like a competition in detecting sociopaths, so I wouldn’t know how I’d do at detecting the most skilled of them, or in competition with top-notch radars, but I can say that a number of times in my life I’ve been amazed at the failures of some people to detect them. (Perhaps most of the dunces were women, but nothing like all of them were.) I’m not entirely sure there’s a talent for it; it’s possible that I’ve classified some people as sociopaths who were not. On the other hand, it’s hard to believe that it’s nothing, since, as I said, the failures of some to detect are amazing to me.
If I have the potential to be taken for a sucker, it’s because I tend to reject my own hunches as possibly unfair or uncharitable or un-Christian. There have been times when I’ve continued to deal with someone who had set my radar off, since I had some idea that they couldn’t help being not so good, and that I could avoid the severe consequences, if any. Somewhat, it’s as if I were required by some duty of “office” to deal with them, although I won’t always deal – far from it.
Anyway, Triton, the main thing I wanted to say is that it’s amazing that so many buzzers are *not* set off by those cadences, etc.
But there’s a hitch. The wolves are still out there, circling in the dark. Society cannot be led by wolves any more. But can it live without the sheepdogs?
No, but that raises another question, circling back to the begining. Does society even know how to tell the difference between wolf and sheep dog any longer? We seem to like putting the sheep dogs on trial these days.
I have been hearing this complaint [that Wall Street is too focused on short term gails] for over seventy years. And I’m only 64.
The American economy is a big thing and it could well take seventy years for such a trend to reach its conclusion. In a 70,000 person company I worked for, it took nearly 20 years for a strain of rot to work it’s way completely through the culture.
17. bogie wheel: TOTUS == Teleprompter Of The United States???
Nobody tells me these things…..
tom
#63, Ain’t that the truth. When a boss once asked me why I was so good at avoiding having crazy people as clients I told him I was the black sheep of my family-the only one who had finished school, avoided substance abuse issues and was earning a good living via legitimate means.
I think Clinton and Obama are alike in basic emotional makeup but quite dissimilar in manner of expression because of differences in upbringing. It’s not just the narcissistic sense of grandiosity and the craving to be the center of attention. Both men came to the Presidency with a paucity of genuine accomplishments despite an impressive education because they share a desire to keep their options open that hampers decision making.
I saw a lot of this type in the business world. They’d rise fast but stall out in mid career. Headhunters loved to present them to clients because they interviewed well. Usually they moved on to an even better position between the time the placement fee was due and the genuine results were expected. When the started to interview for the very top jobs, that lack of genuine accomplishment often caught up with them. Both Obama and Clinton decided to run for the presidency in a year when party elders told them to wait until they had more experience. I think each man knew that time is always their enemy, that it would make the lack of real accomplishment all the more noticeable to voters.
The irony is that Clinton, once called the first black president, takes much of his personal style from the culture Thomas Sowell described so well in Black Rednecks and White Liberals. It isn’t a style that plays well to a great many people outside that culture itself, which may be the reason so many voters were wary of Clinton from the start. Obama, despite his African father, is quite WASP in demeanor. His mother’s family is from the cultural line that traced from Boston Puritan through prairie Congregationalist to west coast communist. This style was reinforced in Chicago where he learned that while he needed the Rev. Wright to give him street cred among black voters, when it came to raising campaign cash, there was nothing Chicago lakefront liberals love more than a black who talks and acts white. That cool, detached style served to mask the extreme nature of Obama’s policy positions during the election cycle.
102. JMH: if the strain of rot working its way thru american culture is an inability to recognize the necessity of the sheepdog and we are actively trying to hurt and disable them,
the consequences wont take 20-30-40 or more years to appear,
its more likely the consequences are in the planning stages even as we write this thread.
becuase the wolves dont live in a bubble unaware of our self inflicted wounds, they are predators and have allready spotted our weaknesses and are trying to come up- with a plan to capitalize on it and destroy us once and for all.
Manson was a psychopath at an early age, he raped a boy in reform school. Later on he developed schizophrenia, resulting in his bizzare political beliefs. Most people were shocked by them, but he still has a cult following, especially radical Greens. See the ATWA page at http://www.atwa.be.
I think there are lots schizophrenics in fundamentalist religions, we just don’t recognize it in this context.
Eric, right –there’s just no way to prove that schizophrenia is not spirit-possession. It’s just an article of faith that it isn’t.
107 Buddy
Or its an article of faith that it is.
JMH: if the strain of rot working its way thru american culture is an inability to recognize the necessity of the sheepdog and we are actively trying to hurt and disable them,
the consequences wont take 20-30-40 or more years to appear,
Rumcrook, sorry, I was responding to two different subthreads and didn’t mean to link them.
The strain of rot I was referring to in #102 was the short-term thinking infesting our corporate business climate.
But on the larger point, I do think that any sort of rot, even that of putting sheep dogs on trial, can take generations to reach the tipping point. Because the rot doesn’t spring forth fully, ah, rotted. It starts small, a few people here and there held in check by the rest of the culture. But perversely, because they’re a small and insignificant part of the whole, they tend to escape being held accountable for their mistakes (since their mistakes don’t get turned into policy). Yet they are free to snipe at every mistep and unpleasant side effect of the larger culture, and this causes their numbers to grow. Possibly very slowly.
Thirty years ago we were kicking our sheep dogs. Ask Habu if you see him stop by. But there were some limits to how hard the rest of society would let the rotters kick. There are more rotters today, and they’re less inclined to listen to objections.
108 –so true, herb –
109 –that’s why the MSM is our Waterloo –unless we win –
Jamie Irons: here’s a link to a free PDF download of Cleckley’s “Mask of Sanity.”
http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm
The whole magilla.
Wretchard,
There was a program on HBO where a psychiatrist interviewed a serial killer who worked for the Mafia as a contract killer, his nickname was “The Iceman” for his habit of storing his victims in deep freezes for a period of years then leaving them dismembered around New Jersey to hamper identification.
The psychiatrist pointed out that sociopaths have some qualities that are beneficial if they have a moral framework that they grew up with and adopted. Namely, they have an abnormally low response to what normal people would regard as fear. They don’t generate much of an emotional response to things others find horrific or terrifying, which comes in handy when you’re the guy in the bomb squad trying to defuse the package in front of you, or the guy that has to Take That Hill, or looking through a scope at a teenage pirate and putting a bullet between the human eyes you’ve been staring at for goodness knows how long. Sheepdogs, in other words, the people who do things the rest of us consider awful or scary and just pass it off as “doing their job”.
Of course, not everyone who is a SEAL or a Delta operator or a fireman is a sociopath, certainly not in the negative connotation. Many people with blunted emotional responses to terrifying things respond normally to their families and loved ones, and many people who do heroic things wonder how they did them after the fact. Training and dedication will make mechanistic physical actions that can be performed before the emotional impact of what’s being done is felt. If every soldier was a sociopath, it’s unlikely there would be any such thing as PTSD — a sociopath doesn’t feel trauma, and won’t feel stress later.
In the program, the abusive and vicious nature of The Iceman’s upbringing was discussed, and the lack of an adopted moral framework added to the hardwiring of a limbic system that just doesn’t respond to emotional trauma like the rest of us proposed as why The Iceman was The Iceman. If the theory is correct, it may explain why sheepdogs can smell other wolves. In my experience, the things we find subconsciously objectionable in others are the qualities we dislike the most about ourselves. If someone is a well-adapted member of society who’s always known they had a low emotional response, the maladapted will display the same behavior and trigger subconscious alarms, the kinds of alarms that can’t be easily argued away because they are nonverbal. What will become apparent next, if you listen to the subconscious, is that there is a basic lack of moral framework. This will be doubly disturbing because the moral framework is all that separates a well-adapted person with low emotional response from a sociopath.
It’s pretty late in this thread to comment, but I always seem to be late in reading threads. (How does everyone get so far ahead of me??)
Still, to all who have commented on habitual liars and sociopathic/psychotic personalities and on con artists, I would like to add these tidbits from my years in a woman’s prison. (That was back in my very far-left days.)
First as to truly evil people: as a leftist, and a new prisoner, I knew they did not exist. Except for evil capitalists, robber barons, and the like. But my fellow prisoners knew better. They would point out the worst ones, saying “that woman is evil.” Thing was, some of the women they called evil would admit to you that that is what they were. They were indifferent about it.
One group that was not indifferent were the women who had killed their own children. Each was in her own private hell, whether it was visible at all times or not.
Prison was graduate school in con artists. After all, some of the best were there. There was general agreement that it takes an ordinary sucker (non-con-artists) around 5 years in prison before they become “con-wise.” That went both for new prisoners and new prison employees alike. That was about how long it took me.
The way it works is not that you ever become totally con-proof – one way or another, anybody can be had! But after 5 years there, you’ve been had so many times that you have learned the stories, the behavior, the signals. You’re not easy any more, and usually you don’t fall for it.
Liars were not at all unusual among prisoners. Yet, by being around each other 24/7 and comparing notes, we spotted the habitual liars pretty quickly. Liars contradict themselves a lot. So much that they cannot possibly keep track of all the things they have said. Outside of prison, habitual liars usually get away with lying, so they can escape getting labeled. They just have to keep moving around to keep so many contradictions from being noticed.
But in prison they can’t keep moving around, so in a month or two, everyone knows whether someone is an habitual liar. And after awhile, knowing who the habitual liars are, you get to notice their characteristics, the little things they have in common. Because of that, it is not unusual for former prisoners to easily spot habitual liars. They may not even know how they spot them. I spotted Clinton the first time I saw him on TV, but I can’t explain exactly how. I was just so familiar with habitual liars by then that it was automatic.
Once we knew someone was an habitual liar, we did not necessarily hold it against them. We were just on guard. With most, it was not aimed at harming anyone. Many just wanted to be liked or thought well of. Often their parents had been drunks or abusive, which made skillful lying a survival trait for their kids. When they tried to reform and turn their lives around, the lying was the last thing to go. It went deep.
As to whether there are evil people, there absolutely are. I wish I didn’t know and could forget some of the things I heard then. There are.
I have seen some, however, become Christians and change. (And in prison, other prisoners watch new converts a long time before they believe it is genuine, because they have seen so many fake it to make parole or beat their cases. It can work.) Still, sometimes we would see a really bad person turn around, through God. But you have to watch them a very, very long time to know whether to believe the reform is genuine. And use great caution with them from then on. Their reform may go a long way, or not.
The wolf is always there, and it is not always an unwelcome guest. It reminds the sheepdog of what it would be without the sheep, and indeed reminds the sheepdog of it’s different path. Without those reminders there would be no real difference between the two. To a degree I can hear the call of the wolf’s howl, and it does pull at me. But then I look a the sheep and stand my position…..