Contents:
1.) Preamble
2.) Introduction to the Paradigm
3.) Self-Medication & Dysfunction
4.) Love & Loyalty
5.) Psychopathic Investment
6.) Psychopathic Pretence & Exposure
7.) In Closing
8.) Relevant Reading
Preamble:
I have been made aware that due to my writings, some have begun to naively glamourise the nature of clinical psychopathy in the name of fearlessness, glory and the pursuit of power. The glamorisation of such perversity has ironically, never been neither my goal nor desire. Allow me to be as candid, concise and succinct as possible on my position of psychopathy’s relevance to the red pill framework.
Psychopathy is held up as an exemplar of a clinical disorder which brings about personality traits that facilitate goal acquisition. It is through this lens we look at psychopathy pragmatically as merely a means to an end, a form of self-empowerment. The end is the power and prosperity that psychopathy can facilitate the actualisation of, the means is the ability to cross boundaries and enter action with boldness relatively uninhibited, devoid of either anxiety or uncertainty. These are elements of the psychopathic personality that are pragmatically efficient and thus beneficial to anybody who comes to possess such traits. They are innate characteristics of the psychopath, but they are not characteristics that need be limited to the clinical psychopath. They are qualities that we may learn to emulate, and hence this is why the word psychopathy is mentioned at all, to give an example of, and a frame of reference for, a set of qualities we hope to embody.
Bearing that in mind, my intimate dissection, exploration, analysis and overall thesis of psychopathy is to give an example of that which comes naturally to a minority, to a majority that it does not. We are effectively, cherry-picking the utilitarian aspects of psychopathy to augment the social effectiveness of the non-psychopathic. People hear the word psychopath and they get distracted by the negative connotations of the word. They begin to become lost in their imagination, rather than really read and listen to exactly what it is I am saying. If you follow my voice through what I say in my words and ignore the playfulness of your imagination, you will find what I am saying about psychopathy is markedly different from what you think about psychopathy. In essence, we study and learn from the psychopath by attempting to emulate their strengths as accurately as we can whilst leaving their weaknesses, mainly the dysfunctional parts of their condition, well alone. Luckily for you, as a student, rather than a natural psychopath, these are things you may pick and choose rather than be forced to live with. Allow me to emphasise the point in order to really nail it home once more: the goal of studying psychopathy is not to become psychopathic, but to become quasi-psychopathic.
In light of this, I find it paramount that the fine readership here are educated intimately on the internal struggle and solipsism of the natural psychopath, in effect, as an effort to de-glamourise and debunk the ill-formed and simplistic views of psychopathy the less informed possess, eg: “how cool it would be to be like Al Capone.” It is my observation that those who struggle with self-confidence, anxiety and other debilitating personal afflictions peer into the world of the psychopath and experience a “grass is greener” mentality.
They see a huge antithetical chasm between what they are and what they are looking at, and immediately like moths to a flame they become drawn to that which they are not, whilst despising that which they are. Such people hear of how little fucks the psychopathic personality gives, and compare it to their own emotional wreck, perceiving the psychopaths dysfunction to be a state of being superior to their own. However, such a person only sees the perks of psychopathy, not the negatives, because by merit of not being psychopathic, they do not understand everything that being psychopathic entails. They see only the best bits, the theatrics, the highlights. They are not making a like-for-like comparison, but are being mis-sold by their own ignorance what the state of psychopathy truly entails. Such cognitive distortions lead to ill-formed, misguided opinion. In light of this, I shall shine a light on psychopathic solipsism by inviting you into the world of the psychopath’s perspective.
Introduction to the Paradigm:
The psychopath contrary to much misguided mainstream thought is incredibly emotionally intelligent, if they weren’t they would be more akin to autists who are inefficient at understanding the emotions of others, let alone manipulating them. Much unlike the autist, the psychopath understands the relationship between emotions very well. They understand the intricate relationships between emotion, which emotions feed into one another, which limit each other, and how to use them tactically to influence people. If you define empathy as an understanding of emotion, then they have empathy. But if you think of empathy as sympathy, as in, a capacity to rationally understand the emotional state of another via logical deconstruction, whilst simultaneously feeling altruistically concerned for another’s well-being, then this is something they fundamentally lack the capacity for. Under these set of definitions, they cannot sympathise, merely empathise.
Psychopaths are by merit of their condition, incredibly lonesome. Psychopaths believe they are the superior focal point of all social interaction that occurs, and it is this view which is accompanied by a sentiment of incredible arrogance. As the psychopath is unable to connect with anyone by merit of the strongly held belief that “they are better than everybody else,” the psychopath oft finds themselves in a quandary between a rock and a hard place when it comes to love, respect and emotional connection.
At their root, psychopaths fundamentally lack a capacity for appreciation, rather than appreciation, psychopaths have dependency, dependency being effectively what appreciation is when you take the emotions away and the subsequent respect that accompanies it. All relations are value judgements to the psychopath, people are dependent on them, and likewise they too are dependent on various people, much to their disdain. Psychopaths like those that they find useful to depend on them for something in order to acquire leverage and by extension, a measure of power over the asset or commodity that said individual represents. Comparatively, they do not like to have to rely or depend on others because anything that falls outside of their direct line of control makes them uncomfortable and paranoid. They do not admire, and they are not admired, as a matter of projection when one does come to admire them, the psychopath becomes suspicious of the admiration, perceiving it as a form of toxic, parasitic dependence. They enjoy the narcissistic supply, but very strong admiration, perhaps better characterised as adoration, repulses them and stirs sensations of immense distrust. Such an attitude towards the imposing feelings of others is a reflexive defence mechanism of the psychopath that is quintessentially symbolic of the paranoid detachment they possess.
Even if a psychopath wanted very much to appreciate another, to feel connected to them, they would struggle immensely, and without drug usage the endeavour would invariably fail. It is due to the insidiousness of this condition that the psychopath feels lonely, because in a state of disconnected superiority and an absence of emotional connection they feel nothing for anyone but themselves. To compound this further, they have such a low opinion of people that they struggle to find value in them, even those who they objectively know to be talented. Psychopaths have a knack for spotting talent, but feeling egotistically threatened by said talent they oft search for or invent some glaring flaw in the talented individual in order to overshadow and vitiate their talent.
When a psychopath sees a talented person who is non-psychopathic, it is like a lion watching a deer that can backflip. “Okay, lovely, nice moves you have there, I respect that, that must have taken you some time to learn, but you’re not a lion, you’re not like me.” Likewise they feel no sympathy for the plight of others, and thus by extension cannot emotionally connect with people by hearing tales of their struggles. Such tales are not a bonding experience for the psychopath like they are for the neurotypical, they are perceived as undue emotional burden, a transgression into the realm of the psychopaths mental sovereignty. The psychopath may not want to be alone, but they don’t want to take on your burdens to feel connection, they rather cause chaos to feel connected instead. It is for this fundamental reason that male psychopaths are dreadful at maintaining long-term relationships with women who lack the sufficient masochism to counterbalance the male psychopath’s abusive personality.
Logically, the psychopath can relate, but emotionally they cannot connect. They are effectively, a prisoner of their own reality, co-existing with other realities rationally, whilst being completely detached from the emotional and spiritual semantics of said realities. Emotionally, they cannot escape their own reality and are unable to cross into others. The psychopath is trapped in their own emotional solipsism and how they feel about others is always merely a lesser outcome in relation to how they feel about themselves. They don’t feel things for others outside of the context of their own emotional world, so for example if you were to anger a psychopath, they would feel hatred for you; but if you were to have a problem that did not affect them in any way, they would not waste a moment on worrying about you.
To surmise this train of thought: if you do not cause them a problem, you are not their problem. They are incapable of caring about anything independent of themselves, so when you have given them no logically self-interested reason to care, they do not and cannot.
Self-Medication & Dysfunction:
Psychopaths have a propensity to indulge heavily in both alcohol and narcotics. The substance abuse appears to be an attempt to use inebriation to induce an ability to “connect with the common folk” and experience “what it’s like to feel emotionally connected” absent of chaos induction. For the psychopath, it is an alternative way to experiment with emotional connection. Psychopaths by default give no fucks for others, this is not out of malice, but simply out of incapability. Malice is a component of sadism, a different element of the dark tetrad (yes tetrad, not triad) that falls outside the scope of this article.
As people with emotional needs who cannot connect with others sympathetically, the psychopath is unendingly tortured by their own sense of loneliness and thus compelled to engage in chaos in order to create a sense of connection in the absence of illicit substances. It is this need for rewarding emotional connection that forms the basis of the insatiable lust for chaos iconic of the psychopath. The psychopath believes that by engaging in highly emotional situations they will perhaps be able to feel something in context to another, effectively, as perverse as it is, the psychopath attempts to medicate their own emotional quiet via the strongest force they know, negative energy. They push boundaries not just because they can, but to find out what their boundaries are. They also do this to attempt to feel emotionally connected to another by conjuring up the strongest emotions possible, call it psychopathic experimentation (at your expense.)
As I briefly mentioned in the prior paragraph, psychopaths tend to be lonely. Often the psychopath frequents rooms full of people, and yet, feels no affinity to anybody that is there. The functional psychopaths tend to keep company consistently, but are almost always alone. People are value functions to psychopaths, not emotionally connected personalities who share a spiritual link with them. By nature of having sympathy shut off, they get to avoid discomfort that neurotypical people feel at the expense of having the capacity to form meaningful mutual emotional connections. Functional psychopaths put on a really good outward display of “being on top of their shit,” but fundamentally they are damaged by merit of their inescapable emotional solitude. Psychopaths are not unfeeling people, they have and experience emotion, they merely care exclusively for their own feelings and are totally indifferent to the feelings of others. This assumes of course that the feelings of others are irrelevant to their plans and do not need to be manipulated in order to achieve a goal. If another’s feelings must be maintained or coaxed in a specific manner in order to achieve a personal goal, they will attempt to emulate sympathy and exploit emotion for personal gain.
Love & Loyalty:
The closest thing psychopaths experience to “love” or “closeness” is a respect for skill. Psychopaths covet intelligence, and because they are incapable of loyalty, they are perpetually paranoid that those who are in a position to betray them will inevitably do so. This is of course a manifestation of projection. They would abandon you in your hour of need if your value to them was disposable or easily replaceable. Hence they think through the lens of “what they would do” that the same is true of everybody else.
Rather ironically anybody who becomes aware of a psychopath in their life and all that entails would in the absence of abandoning the psychopath outright, quite rationally opt to betray them should a situation demand it. Wielding an understanding of the psychopathic personality reveals that such a person would betray one, so why would one feel loyalty to a person who does not reciprocate? Alas, you see, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy of distrust perpetuated by the psychopath’s inability to trust sufficiently. Psychopathic trust is limited to the confines of a power differential which is unfairly distributed in favour of the psychopath. That is to say, psychopaths need hegemonic leverage and meaningful assurance to exercise any modicum of trust.
Loyalty as wonderful as it is does not flourish if it is not mutual, and the psychopath by merit of their condition is incapable of it, hence loyalty is an element of the human social experience that the psychopath utterly struggles with, much to their detriment. Alliances for psychopaths are tactical partnerships which lack the solidification of emotional bonds, and it is the absence of these emotional bonds which ultimately makes their alliances more fickle, opportunistic, and fleeting. Only a very unintelligent individual is going to be loyal to someone who has no loyalty to them, loyalty between the aware and intelligent being characterised as a reciprocal mutually shared affinity where personal sacrifice and help is guaranteed in case of emergency.
Likewise, psychopaths are terrible at maintaining the pretence that they care, it utterly exhausts them. Again quite ironically and somewhat humorously, due to rather pronounced narcissism and a constant need for stimulation, they struggle to tolerate the only people dumb enough to actually give them any meaningful measure of one way loyalty, the cluelessly stupid. So you see, the natural psychopath suffers from a kind of “trust paradox” (potential future article) which pollutes their life in so much as how it acts as a continuously permeating source of uncertainty.
Psychopaths struggle with trust and loyalty because they are intrinsically, irrationally, distrustful and disloyal. Never trust a psychopath to come and save your life unless your death would deprive the psychopath in question of something significant that they value. In order for them to save you in said hypothetical situation, you’d have to pass a cost-benefit analysis. Trust a psychopath to look out for their own self-interest and attach yourself to that self-interest should you need their assistance.
Psychopaths do not even feel attachment to their parents, much less others. That’s the thing with psychopaths, everything is a game, all of the time. As one would suspect, all this distrust, disloyalty and inability to sympathise makes them very bad long-term partners. Owing to this they have a pronounced tendency to be abusive in relationships because they simply don’t give a fuck about how the other person feels and what their psychological needs are. To a psychopath, the relationship is primarily about them, the other person serves as an accessory whose function is to service the needs of the psychopath. Psychopaths are very effective at picking up women, their short-term sexual strategy is second to none. However in long-term relationships, they absolutely bomb it. It takes a lot of conscious effort and training on the part of a psychopath to raise a somewhat functional family and not fuck it all up with blind rage, sadism and general disconnection towards their partner and offspring.
Psychopathic Investment:
Psychopaths only care about people in two ways: what that person can do for them (Briffault’s Law) and how much time they have personally invested into said person. The longer a psychopath knows you, the more they care for you owing to the amount of time they have spent on you.
Don’t mistake “care” for sympathy, I mean “care” as in a rare display of respect, however the respect is a strange kind of respect absent of emotional connectivity. It’s hard to explain, so I’ll put it like this: say you really like your laptop but one day your laptop ceases to work, you become mad because your laptop is broken, but you’re not sad that your laptop is broken. You took for granted something the laptop did for you and you came to like that, but you don’t actually feel an emotional loss for the death of your laptop. Well that’s how psychopaths are with people. Your death would cause them a problem by removing the supply of whatever it is they have come to rely on you for, and that would make them mad. They are mad that your death creates a problem, not upset that you are dead because they miss you or any other emotional reason you can contrive. Notice the subtle nuance there, it is relevant to understanding the nature of the psychopath. That’s “how they care.” Every way in which they like you is related to how you can make them feel within the moment, as well as how stimulating you are. If you were to disappear, they’d simply look for another version of you to fulfil that role within their lives. Eternally dissatisfied, people are nothing but varying classifications of stimulant to the psychopath.
When you have a psychopath in your life, you have to think differently when you deal with them in order to better relate to them. Being as narcissistic as they are, spending lots of time on you causes them to believe there must be something special about you because they don’t normally give people the time of day. Psychopaths are takers and they thrive on givers, they are parasitic people, and so they tend to place exceptional value on their time rarely doing anything that does not directly benefit them. If you have some trait, quality or use that has allowed you to monopolise much of a psychopaths time, they will ascribe a measure of value to you based proportionately to the amount of time expended on you. In this way, they are quite similar to the neurotypical, except the manifestation of this dynamic is far more ruthless and emphatically pronounced.
Functional relationships with psychopaths generally stem from mutually beneficial outcomes, that is to say, they want to use you for a purpose and likewise, you them. This can be characterised rather simply and innocently, or quite complexly and malevolently. Truly the nature of the quid pro quo transaction depends on the situation you find yourself in. Generalising the machiavellianism of the psychopath is difficult, and so without situational specifics it would be incredibly misrepresentative to attempt generalisation. It takes a certain kind of person to be friends with the psychopath, they are very aloof, uncaring and in need of a consistent stream of stimulation. If you are someone who seeks emotional connectivity, the “strangeness” of the psychopath will alienate you. If you are uninteresting, relatively unintelligent or unremarkable in any way, likewise, you will more than likely be discarded by the psychopath due to a lack of value demonstration.
Psychopathic Pretence & Exposure:
If they’re not actively “pretending to care” a psychopath will never wish somebody good luck, well wish or partake in any of the social pleasantries which come naturally to the majority of us. They have no concern for the well-being of others, so they do not express it. When a psychopath does pretend to care, as rare as it is, it is a sign they like you or are trying to convince you they’re normal due to an ulterior motive. Predominantly it is what the psychopath doesn’t do and doesn’t say that outs them as psychopathic.
Psychopaths are very poor at blending in and “seeming like one of the herd” because they’re easily exasperated by fabricating interest in things they fundamentally do not care for. The pretence wears on them and exhausts them. Furthermore, due to their narcissism they don’t want to “seem like others” because they believe they are better than most and “fitting in” would be lowering themselves. The best way to expose a psychopath pretending not to be one is through a war of attrition. They will only last so long at keeping up the façade before deducing the benefit from maintaining the façade is outweighed by the cost and thus opting to drop their mask. Making a psychopath pretend to care is the ultimate shit test and removes some of their autonomy, much to their own intense displeasure.
In Closing:
If you weren’t born an unsympathetic psychopath, you won’t become one. Glamourising dysfunction is pointless because even if you could somehow manage to induce a state of psychopathy, all you’d really be doing is trading one set of problems for another. You will always have to deal with the threat your capacity for sympathy represents whilst the psychopath has to deal with unending loneliness and an intensely paranoid distrust of everybody.
Relevant Reading:
Buy “The Wisdom of the Psychopaths” in the USA
Buy “The Wisdom of the Psychopaths” in the UK
Buy “The Wisdom of the Psychopaths“ in Canada
Buy “Zero Degrees of Empathy” in the USA
Buy “Zero Degrees of Empathy” in the UK
Buy “Zero Degrees of Empathy” in the Canada
