That LA Times article on Israelis is a fascinating primer. Culturally very similar to how the Lebos act in Australia. They treat fair dinkum Aussies as suckers, dumb whitey with the handshake. You look down & your arm is missing... This type of bloke only respects money and the backup 👊 , niceywishy washy is an offered throat to them.
Western culture, AND Western men, are perceived as weak.
Immigrants should assimilate into the culture which welcomed them. Many host countries do not promote or work on proper assimilation. Superficially a culture can involve street littering or jaywalking -- and it goes deeper from there. Culture can be deep rooted, especially if religion differs. It's a big job. Passage of time helps. Flooding a country works against assimilation.
Excellent article. I view psychopathy as a spectrum. Question: does a psychopath who adheres to a strong empathetic moral code exist? I could argue, yes: Zero empathy and strong morality (as formulaic empathy) can coexist.
Reading this, it strikes me that the Lobaczewski view of the general problem is only hemispherical in that it considers exogenous threats only, and largely disregards endogenous factors that by nature make people more susceptible to bamboozlement by outside bad actors. This reaction to your post popped into my mind because I'm in the midst of reading a much more recent psychiatrist's book, that by Christopher Palmer (https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1) that provides a general theory as to why a lot of Lobaczewski's bad actors (and "freiers", too) arise in the first place. I think adding what Palmer has to say to what to Lobaczewski wrote, would flesh things out nicely and provide quite a few more avenues for attenuation of the perennial threat.
Will have to check it out. Just a note that Lobaczewski discusses various endogenous factors, both those leading to personality disorders (genetics, brain damage, socialization) and common psychological traits and processes that deal with normal people's reactions. Looks like Palmer might cover more of the "normal" end of the spectrum, like anxiety and depression disorders. Those fall into the neurotic side of the equation more so than the psychopathic side.
Nah -- his model can be extended across the whole range of mental (and physical) disorders with no difficulty. He doesn't go that far in what he has to say, being concerned with higher frequency ailments (the "normal"), but the basic controlling mechanism of his model provides a handy interpretative tool for explaining the remarkable intensification of human violence and hierarchy during and after the Neolithic Revolution and subsequent growth of plant agriculture. Out of the Edenic frying pan, and into the Lobaczewkian fire.
His whole explanation that the natural vision of the world of normal people is not sufficient for dealing with psychopathology is a present state assumption, and basically is what leaves him (and his readers) with only a hemispherical view. Being a 'normal people' is not a 'thermodynamically stable' or desirable state, no matter its apparent intransigence now or in the past. The stuff Palmer talks about, howver, suggests that there might be a very practical approach to boosting 'immunity' to pathocratic exogenous agents, using the basic evolutionary equipment our species is already equipped with; Palmer seems to indicate we can quit shooting ourselves in the foot, and thereby also/simultaneously become protected against those who might also want to inflict harm on us. I doubt if the state of science, especially psychiatry, at the time of Lobaczewski would have allowed him and his peers to contemplate such a possibility.
Palmer doesn't use the dichotomy of normalcy and pathocracy/pathology like Lobaczewski does -- he instead uses the more generic terms, mentally ill and mentally healthy, and points out that in the modern US case fully 50% of Americans are mentally ill at some time in their lives (the state of mental illness is oftentimes ephemeral). Now Lobaczewski more or less observes that social pathology sort of crystallizes out of a mass of people who are mentally bent to varying degrees, and that these birds-of-a-feather trouble-makers, working in concert, wreak havoc on everyone. I agree, Lobaczewski nails it there. But the differences are 1) Palmer is not focused on groups or culture at large but the individuals generating that culture, and 2) Palmer's scientifically supported point-of-view indicates most (not including those relatively few who are laboring under physical or genetic damage) individual mental disorders are metabolic (mitochondrial) in origin and are metabolically reversible by various means (which Palmer relates and describes ad nauseaum). Besides his main point that human mental (and physical) illness is demonstrably metabolic in nature, Palmer and his peers interestingly seem to have the most pronounced success in reversing particularly difficult, intransigent mental health problems by getting their patients to adopt a ketogenic (low carb/Atkins/paleo) diet. And, what's really interesting about that is that there is concrete archeological evidence that us humans got as violent as we are immediately after agricultural grains/carbs became the dominant feature of our day-to-day diet. See https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9mjnl0ou7s3ee3krty25z/Violence-trends-in-the-ancient-Middle-East-between-12-000-and-400-BCE.pdf?rlkey=yw52gwmzbk7bihm4eixvbet9n&dl=0. So, if our paleolithic brains can't live on carbs without going crazy and more violent to one degree or another, it becomes apparent that the more people who attend to their mitochondrially-based mental health by minimizing ingestion of those new-fashioned carbs ("new" =~ last 10,000 years), the fewer the psychopaths, and the fewer the psychopath followers we'll all have to contend with/try to police/isolate. In sum, Lobaczewski proposes a downstream solution, after the cow has already gotten out of the barn and is stomping on the wet pasture, while Palmer's stuff seems to support an upstream solution that in essence consists of keeping the cow safely in the barn in the first place.
Lobaczewski would probably say that it can't be cured, but it may be ameliorated, and it may be possible to lower the number of psychopaths who get born. Who knows, maybe the diet issues contribute to the prevalence of the psychopathic phenotype? And certain dietary interventions may make psychopaths less "intense".
great piece, Harrison... i'm in the process of reconciling some old trauma, some inflicted upon me, and some that i inflicted on others... working on a complete-amateur paper to pass along some useful info to others that are also working their way toward self-actualization... thank you... God bless.
Great to know some really do get it; the truth of evil and it's methods. The Universal mechanisms remain the same through time...'As much as things change, they stay the same.' Evil can only succeed when 'GOOD PEOPLE' do nothing or allow evil to stomp all over them.
Considering how difficult this subject can be to understand, this explanation is quite well-stated.
I was waiting for some real-world examples. But perhaps this is not the place for those. They can be very compelling, though. Some of my favorites come from the two lectures given by Stanton E. Samenow that I have been able to find online. He is author of the book Inside the Criminal Mind.
It is truly difficult to imagine what a "garden variety" psychopath will do to "protect" themselves. Real world examples can be very revealing.
I was introduced to the concept of the psychopath when I got involved in Scientology in 1981. Hubbard called this personality type a "suppressive person." Such people normally operate (in public) at the tone level of "covert hostility" and in Scientology we are trained to recognize such people and either deal with them or avoid them.
There are the psychopath’s two cousins. The sociopath and the ‘non-evil’ sociopath. The second one is a normal acting mostly middle class person who doesn’t do anything wrong, although they lie and cheat well. But they aren’t killing people etc. They just don’t actually feel anything. Their one emotion is tension. Positive or negative. They tend to be serial cheaters because it keeps their tension up, without which they quickly descend into an abyss, as real emotions don’t mean anything to them. Better to feel the tension of a lie than emptiness. These people end up draining everyone around them. At the same time they are pretty good at ‘playing the game’. Saying the right thing, bringing a casserole, saying ‘aaah’ when they should. Long practice watching others actually emote has made them good actors. But they feel nothing.
It is funny or maybe not how things connect mysterious - the author at that long-time site - she is the daughter of the fella was on the ground during Operation Paperclip......tis a small world I reckon.
That LA Times article on Israelis is a fascinating primer. Culturally very similar to how the Lebos act in Australia. They treat fair dinkum Aussies as suckers, dumb whitey with the handshake. You look down & your arm is missing... This type of bloke only respects money and the backup 👊 , niceywishy washy is an offered throat to them.
Western culture, AND Western men, are perceived as weak.
Immigrants should assimilate into the culture which welcomed them. Many host countries do not promote or work on proper assimilation. Superficially a culture can involve street littering or jaywalking -- and it goes deeper from there. Culture can be deep rooted, especially if religion differs. It's a big job. Passage of time helps. Flooding a country works against assimilation.
Excellent article. I view psychopathy as a spectrum. Question: does a psychopath who adheres to a strong empathetic moral code exist? I could argue, yes: Zero empathy and strong morality (as formulaic empathy) can coexist.
I'd say theoretically, but in practice rarely. Empathy is usually what inspires a strong morality. There's little motivation to do so without it.
Reading this, it strikes me that the Lobaczewski view of the general problem is only hemispherical in that it considers exogenous threats only, and largely disregards endogenous factors that by nature make people more susceptible to bamboozlement by outside bad actors. This reaction to your post popped into my mind because I'm in the midst of reading a much more recent psychiatrist's book, that by Christopher Palmer (https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Energy-Revolutionary-Understanding-Health/dp/1637741588/ref=sr_1_1) that provides a general theory as to why a lot of Lobaczewski's bad actors (and "freiers", too) arise in the first place. I think adding what Palmer has to say to what to Lobaczewski wrote, would flesh things out nicely and provide quite a few more avenues for attenuation of the perennial threat.
Will have to check it out. Just a note that Lobaczewski discusses various endogenous factors, both those leading to personality disorders (genetics, brain damage, socialization) and common psychological traits and processes that deal with normal people's reactions. Looks like Palmer might cover more of the "normal" end of the spectrum, like anxiety and depression disorders. Those fall into the neurotic side of the equation more so than the psychopathic side.
Nah -- his model can be extended across the whole range of mental (and physical) disorders with no difficulty. He doesn't go that far in what he has to say, being concerned with higher frequency ailments (the "normal"), but the basic controlling mechanism of his model provides a handy interpretative tool for explaining the remarkable intensification of human violence and hierarchy during and after the Neolithic Revolution and subsequent growth of plant agriculture. Out of the Edenic frying pan, and into the Lobaczewkian fire.
Ok, I'll really have to check it out. ;)
His whole explanation that the natural vision of the world of normal people is not sufficient for dealing with psychopathology is a present state assumption, and basically is what leaves him (and his readers) with only a hemispherical view. Being a 'normal people' is not a 'thermodynamically stable' or desirable state, no matter its apparent intransigence now or in the past. The stuff Palmer talks about, howver, suggests that there might be a very practical approach to boosting 'immunity' to pathocratic exogenous agents, using the basic evolutionary equipment our species is already equipped with; Palmer seems to indicate we can quit shooting ourselves in the foot, and thereby also/simultaneously become protected against those who might also want to inflict harm on us. I doubt if the state of science, especially psychiatry, at the time of Lobaczewski would have allowed him and his peers to contemplate such a possibility.
Palmer doesn't use the dichotomy of normalcy and pathocracy/pathology like Lobaczewski does -- he instead uses the more generic terms, mentally ill and mentally healthy, and points out that in the modern US case fully 50% of Americans are mentally ill at some time in their lives (the state of mental illness is oftentimes ephemeral). Now Lobaczewski more or less observes that social pathology sort of crystallizes out of a mass of people who are mentally bent to varying degrees, and that these birds-of-a-feather trouble-makers, working in concert, wreak havoc on everyone. I agree, Lobaczewski nails it there. But the differences are 1) Palmer is not focused on groups or culture at large but the individuals generating that culture, and 2) Palmer's scientifically supported point-of-view indicates most (not including those relatively few who are laboring under physical or genetic damage) individual mental disorders are metabolic (mitochondrial) in origin and are metabolically reversible by various means (which Palmer relates and describes ad nauseaum). Besides his main point that human mental (and physical) illness is demonstrably metabolic in nature, Palmer and his peers interestingly seem to have the most pronounced success in reversing particularly difficult, intransigent mental health problems by getting their patients to adopt a ketogenic (low carb/Atkins/paleo) diet. And, what's really interesting about that is that there is concrete archeological evidence that us humans got as violent as we are immediately after agricultural grains/carbs became the dominant feature of our day-to-day diet. See https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/9mjnl0ou7s3ee3krty25z/Violence-trends-in-the-ancient-Middle-East-between-12-000-and-400-BCE.pdf?rlkey=yw52gwmzbk7bihm4eixvbet9n&dl=0. So, if our paleolithic brains can't live on carbs without going crazy and more violent to one degree or another, it becomes apparent that the more people who attend to their mitochondrially-based mental health by minimizing ingestion of those new-fashioned carbs ("new" =~ last 10,000 years), the fewer the psychopaths, and the fewer the psychopath followers we'll all have to contend with/try to police/isolate. In sum, Lobaczewski proposes a downstream solution, after the cow has already gotten out of the barn and is stomping on the wet pasture, while Palmer's stuff seems to support an upstream solution that in essence consists of keeping the cow safely in the barn in the first place.
Palmer would certainly say less damaging psychopathologies could be cured using the methods he talks about. Here are several papers that indicate some of the stuff Palmer discusses has already been tested/applied/examined by quite a few researchers with regard to human aggression and violence, and run-of-the-mill mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia: 1) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334171599_You_may_be_what_you_eat_can_you_be_violent_due_to_your_food (watch out for people who drink their coffee black), 2) https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.951376/full, and 3) https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/23/7/434/5861311
Lobaczewski would probably say that it can't be cured, but it may be ameliorated, and it may be possible to lower the number of psychopaths who get born. Who knows, maybe the diet issues contribute to the prevalence of the psychopathic phenotype? And certain dietary interventions may make psychopaths less "intense".
Hacking the Human
From Jason Bourne to the Reality of Reality
It is called... Behavioral Modification Science...
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/hacking-the-human
This American Life produced a segment on Freiers back in the early 00s: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/222/transcript#act3
great piece, Harrison... i'm in the process of reconciling some old trauma, some inflicted upon me, and some that i inflicted on others... working on a complete-amateur paper to pass along some useful info to others that are also working their way toward self-actualization... thank you... God bless.
here's a link if you want to see the progress... it's still in infancy though: https://www.christopher.news/old-news/next-project
Thanks, Chris, and good luck with the paper. Look forward to reading it when it's done.
Great to know some really do get it; the truth of evil and it's methods. The Universal mechanisms remain the same through time...'As much as things change, they stay the same.' Evil can only succeed when 'GOOD PEOPLE' do nothing or allow evil to stomp all over them.
Considering how difficult this subject can be to understand, this explanation is quite well-stated.
I was waiting for some real-world examples. But perhaps this is not the place for those. They can be very compelling, though. Some of my favorites come from the two lectures given by Stanton E. Samenow that I have been able to find online. He is author of the book Inside the Criminal Mind.
It is truly difficult to imagine what a "garden variety" psychopath will do to "protect" themselves. Real world examples can be very revealing.
I was introduced to the concept of the psychopath when I got involved in Scientology in 1981. Hubbard called this personality type a "suppressive person." Such people normally operate (in public) at the tone level of "covert hostility" and in Scientology we are trained to recognize such people and either deal with them or avoid them.
Yeah, I've read Samenow, too. He's got good examples.
There are the psychopath’s two cousins. The sociopath and the ‘non-evil’ sociopath. The second one is a normal acting mostly middle class person who doesn’t do anything wrong, although they lie and cheat well. But they aren’t killing people etc. They just don’t actually feel anything. Their one emotion is tension. Positive or negative. They tend to be serial cheaters because it keeps their tension up, without which they quickly descend into an abyss, as real emotions don’t mean anything to them. Better to feel the tension of a lie than emptiness. These people end up draining everyone around them. At the same time they are pretty good at ‘playing the game’. Saying the right thing, bringing a casserole, saying ‘aaah’ when they should. Long practice watching others actually emote has made them good actors. But they feel nothing.
Have you taken the Mach IV test? It measures how “Machiavellian” you are. https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/MACH-IV/
Hey - just posted a link to your place here:
https://emsnews.wordpress.com/2024/03/01/massive-blizzards-bury-west-coast-global-warming-isnt-global/#comment-932856
~
It is funny or maybe not how things connect mysterious - the author at that long-time site - she is the daughter of the fella was on the ground during Operation Paperclip......tis a small world I reckon.
Ken
I don't know. Best I can guess is that's is more permanent in some than in others.