VERSION FRANCOPHONE INTRO & VOCAB
Out of all humanity, approximately three percent of men and one percent of women are sociopaths. One percent of humanity consists of psychopaths.
According to the therapists’ preference, those suffering from psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder and malignant narcissism, are interchangeable. Psychopaths tend to be anarchistic lone wolves, often lethal and delusional; whereas sociopaths are otherwise sane people who tend to join a subculture that promotes their vicious selfishness (like organized crime, prison, politics and the military).
Four or more percent of corporate chiefs are psychopaths, and who knows what percentage of politicians and the military? What would be the proportion of preachers, more intent on their meticulous textual fundamentalism than more natural – and from their point of view, satanic – dictates of moral conscience?
The same proportions reside inside and outside of prison, even though psycho/sociopathic convicts are guilty of almost all the violent crimes being punished. Most other convicts are locked up for victimless or one-time crimes, by a clique of psycho/sociopathic cops, court officers, legislators and their cronies.
Is there a parallel between the fact that 96% of the universe is made up of “dark matter and energy” whereas only four percent is visible matter; and 96% of mankind is conscience-driven, whereas four percent is not?
Such people can tell right from wrong in their behavior, but derive no unpleasant feelings when they commit the latter. They have no conscience, no shame and no love for anyone. They do not know what those feelings are, and look down on those bound by conscience. The truth is a matter of convenience for them, to be biased to their advantage. Especially the truth about themselves.
Many of them are charming and debonair when so inclined, manipulative and vicious when they can get away with it. They can “read” like a book the body language and facial expressions of the conscience-driven. They can fake emotions, seek pity and affection they never feel for others, and seduce their victims before they exploit, insult or injure them on purpose. They use people and discard them, the way you would use a Kleenex and throw it away.
They can commit sins without guilt, that we would find inconceivable during commission and very painful to live with, after. They get away with many evils because those around them cannot imagine such complex, belligerent and risky undertakings for such trivial reasons (like boredom, idle greed, one-upmanship or jealousy of those with superior talents).
Since their brains are not preoccupied by the infinite subconscious calculations of moral conscience and love (a little like those needed to stay upright on a bicycle, but a lot more complicated), they are burdened with a semi-permanent sense of drudgery and boredom they can only relieve by serial risky behaviors and elaborate manipulations (torture, humiliation and betrayal) of their conscientious inferiors.
They usually wind up in old age alone, broke and shunned by everyone, their family included. Many are slain or socially crushed by the powerful protector of one of their victims, or by numerous avengers. Very few die in bed surrounded by people who love them. They are pitiable, if quite dangerous, moral amputees.
The craft of government consists in keeping psycho/sociopaths in check (that is, moderately well off for doing as little damage as possible) for as long as possible. The tragedy of government is that they will take over the highest levels of government, sooner or later, as well as several ranks underneath, and ruin everything more or less for no good reason.
Recall that their principle motive is the relief of their boredom through chaos.
From a peace mentality point of view, good government is peaceful, fair, generous and permissive. You may do pretty much what you please, and not be interfered with by the government, except under special circumstances and with elaborate restraints.
Sociopaths thrive under such minimal constraints, and gradually assume all the powers of wealth and political promotion. They will recruit their sociopath peers as employees in organizations either dysfunctional or openly criminal. Eventually, they will take over everything and eject the conscience-driven from every position of responsibility; their self-serving abuse will rot out the rest of society.
The cumulative resentment of the vast majority of the conscience-driven will provoke bloody revolution. Following a bloodbath at the hands of elite sociopaths, the conscientious will discover the military advantage of a chain of command directed by sociopaths, will adopt it and thus fatally compromise the ideals that drew them to revolt.
After a series of psycho/sociopath-led oscillations of revolution and counter-revolution (this chaos their idea of paradise, allowing the greatest scope for their evil), the slate will be wiped clean, most of the small minority of sociopath leaders will be exterminated, and so many additional casualties will be induced, that exhausted and disgusted conscience-driven survivors will take up once again the temporary craft of government. They will reward surviving psycho/sociopaths at minimal expense to do the least damage – and so on.
Given this sociopathocracy noted in Learners, if your conscience motivates you to seek good and reduce evil; no matter what race, ethnicity, country, religion, ideology or organization you belong to or reject: half your worst enemies will belong to your side and half of your friends, to the other side. The only real segregation is between those driven by conscience and those without. The “side” they belong to is irrelevant.
Be warned and pick you side carefully.
There are dependable psychological tests to identify them. Mostly, their brains react to emotional problems the way most people’s (who have no problem with emotional situations) react to an algebra problem. The same brain volumes light up.
The easiest way to identify them is as schoolyard bullies and animal torturers during their naïf youth, and as perfect innocents and shameless pity seekers when caught for serial adult misdeeds.
They are never wrong. It is always someone else’s fault, including their victims’ who deserve to be abused.
Their routine speech is that of weapon government, regardless of its provenance.
There is no cure for their disease, chemical or psychoanalytical (except, perhaps eventually, for genetic surgery). They do not wish to be cured. They consider themselves superior, and the conscience-driven, inferior.
After advanced group therapy sessions deliberately targeting their affliction, they emerged with better techniques to simulate emotions they did not feel, thus duping their future victims with greater ease.
Track them down, identify them and exclude them from positions of authority, high and low. A 1-800 telephone number should be dedicated to their victims. They should be able to drop a dime on any sociopath who torments them. Investigators would then bring the suspected sociopath in for testing, the results of which would confirm or deny their need to be restricted from positions of responsibility and authority.
Above all, never allow them to assume control of the hunt for sociopaths. If given the slightest chance, they will exceed all the evils of the Inquisition (another sociopath Paradise), hunting down the innocent and laughing about it.
On the other hand, they should be stroked and cozened once identified during childhood, and generously subsidized throughout their lifetime (thus neutralizing a great chunk of the merely lazy ones, shameless parasites but otherwise harmless); provided constructive, risk-taking outlets for their overwhelming boredom (demining and outer space exploration, for example) and otherwise peacefully neutralized in every way possible.
The last thing we would wish for: that they become antagonized against the rest of humanity, or scared for their life or liberty. No other army would be more lethal, no insurrection more destructive, no terrorist group more alarming than that of psycho/sociopaths reunited (often, they are anarchistic individualists, and their organizations dysfunctional―see civilian Nazis) because rejected by rest of us.
Their primary social utility is in war, when they find the most frightful atrocity easy, then move on to the next. Unimpeded by moral conscience, they are more technically competent at killing and more imaginative with it. Organized massacre is their county fair. They suffer no pangs of conscience from the grim chore of killing the enemy, not even from the increase of casualties on their own side to get that job done.
Sociopaths commit the first atrocities in war and then take off for the next ones, anonymous, invisible and unpunished. Meanwhile, the remaining conscientious people in uniform (or peaceful villagers left behind) will be punished in revenge.
If those sociopaths are officious enough, normals will obey their insane orders and commit crimes unthinkable under other circumstances. This is how dirty war propagates on both sides.
Fear them like the devil. They and those under their control are responsible for most of the evil on Earth. In their absence, utopia would be just beyond our reach.
Of course, rich and powerful sociopaths have made a special effort to bad-mouth utopia in every media they could seize control of, as well as insult idealists and pacifists so methodically that they have turned into pariahs in popular culture.
We have repeated their vicious lies to each other, like brainwashed idiots.
Beware!
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door: the Ruthless versus the Rest of Us, Broadway Books, USA, 2005.
Robert D. Hare, Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, The Guildford Press, New York, 1999.
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