9 times out of 10, when I have talked to people about my father's neglectful treatment of me, their first reaction is to make excuses for him and indicate, subtly, that I am exaggerating or am partly responsible for my treatment, "It can be a thankless task raising a boy", "I'm sure he did his best", "All families are a bit dysfunctional" etc etc. If they say these things to me, an adult man, you can imagine the kinds of denial and victim blaming that children get when they complain about how they are treated at home. It's alienating at best, literally maddening at worst being told by any adult one might dare to open up to that you are exaggerating or being unfair to a parent when that parent is a furtive monster.
People can't help but picture their own parents when one speaks the words "father" or "mother". If they had a decent parent, that parent is powerfully signified on hearing the word. I have a feeling that perhaps people unconsciously feel that to condemn my parent, to give me the benefit of the doubt, is to also condemn their own parents, or perhaps their memories of their own childhood. "Parents always try their best". Another very common response is from those that had neglectful parents but denied the reality of their abuse early, these are the ones that are want to say, "Well, I was beaten but it never did me any harm", "I was a tearaway and deserved it" or, best of all, "It made me the man I am today".
The most perfidious forms of that heartless behaviour you will meet in "medical professionals", the kind quick to throw "hypersensitive", "oversensitive", and "perceived [injustice, slights, ...] at the face of every victim disturbing them by trying to share to them their pains.
"Such people do not believe such allegations because the distance between what they think is possible and what they are presented with is too great. This results in cognitive dissonance and the attempt to create a suitable rationalization to retain one’s previous yet faulty worldview."
There is an aspect of projection to this. The disbelief presented in the face of verifiable evidence, is routinely expressed as "What reason could they have for doing x, they have nothing to gain from it?" That response originates from projecting a personal motivational framework onto the range of options the DT type operates under.
> “key academics and researchers in the field of DP are themselves of DP” and that these researchers “actively engage in tactics to block the kind of research undertaken in this study, preventing accurate research from being published.”
Woah! Of course, this makes sense when one realizes that consider themselves "a group of special people" and a percentage of them seek their own well-being by way of their group's well-being... A full-on pathocracy being the quintessence of this tendency.
We really need to raise awareness of the fact that such people(?) are among us and not not like us.
(I put the question mark after people(?) because I suspect that a key reason psychopaths manage to hide so well among us is that we presume all people are more or less like us, and so resist including entities so different from us into our "people" category, and hence deny accepting that they are real. Might it be easier to persuade people of the existence of a not-people-like-us-but-look-like-people category?)
Your description of the group dynamics of institutions makes perfect sense. A recent substack I read (can't remember who) began with a quote from Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" — "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
A recent series of A.I.-driven YouTube podcasts is good at describing this as an emergent phenomenon common to all systems, even among more neurotypical people ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brj9c451zMQ.
Joseph Tainter, in his "The Collapse of Complex Societies," makes a similar argument, but I think both Tainter and the podcast above are emphasizing one side of a coin, which is dangerous because no one is held accountable for their behavior. I have a similar problem reconciling Sapolsky's vision of our lack of free will ... https://annas-archive.org/md5/f2e01aefbd4db1d7fc1b6d11272e59f2
Lobaczewski, Mitchell, and others Harrison is covering so well, covers the other side of the coin ... but in reconciling sociopathic behavior to a largely genetically determined disorder, we are still left struggling to reconcile moral autonomy and accountability ... and find ourselves navigating a more sophisticated version of the fable of the scorpion and the frog ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog.
The subconscious group dynamics on one side of a coin, and genetic determinism on the other, leave us with little wiggle room for personal growth, moral autonomy, and personal accountability. I am not comfortable with that coin ... but don't want to go with digital cash either. Destined to remain poor. 😂
And the recent iteration of the podcast Vsauce2 presented a fairly balanced intro into psychopathy, though just an intro ... and doesn't begin to explore into the political ramifications of resulting group dynamics ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7haxkYwAaU.
You raise a very good question about what it means to be "people" and a human ... a question that I think should be the raison d'etre of education as a never-ending process of maturation. Biologically, an empathy-driven neurotypical individual can mate and produce offspring with Cluster B types, so I guess they are still 'human' ... but that really begs for a finer distinction of the word "species", similar to how absurd it is to imagine a chihuahua trying to mount a golden retriever in heat.
Just a guess, but in the same way Carl Jung proposed UFOs as a metaphor for what was once called witches or sorcery in the pre-industrial era, I've increasingly come to think of the "lizard people" (of early David Icke fame), "Snakes in Suits", or reptilian-like aliens as subconscious metaphors, projections ... an intuitive assumption that some behavior we all have to a small degree such as the narcissistic preening before a date, the machiavellian opportunism of a job interview or making a sale, etc. When observed in others exceeding a tipping point of empathetic norms, collectively, we co-create these 'monsters of the id' ... partially as our own subconscious brake on our own capacity for evil.
Beyond the H.G. Wells "Morlock / Eloi" distinction of future humans, I can't help but to imagine other fictions of evil ... predatory vampires, blindly consuming zombies, and aliens of various ilk as an artistically therapeutic "othering" of our own potential for sociopathic behavior ... otherwise we would not be able to distinguish the bad from the good characters.
The distinction is blunt at the lowest common denominator, maybe a white-hat / black-hat Western or a children's superhero cartoon. But as the consumer of art matures and begins self-therapy through creative art themselves, the anti-hero or more complex characters are more likely to emerge as a Taoist Yin-Yang whole or may leave the art consumer in a reflective state of trying to reconcile the should and should not within themselves.
I've been too busy to keep up with all of the postings thus far, but I thought I'd weigh in on a psychopathic angle I am increasingly aware of here in Japan.
Living in Japan for 43 years now, most of which was spent unsuccessfully trying to navigate the petty politics of Japanese academic institutions (mostly colleges), I finally resigned in protest from a tenured position 10 years ago at age 59 ... and spent 2 of the last 10 years as an Assistant Language Teacher rotating between 12 public schools for elementary and Jr. High school aged kids. Those public schools were just as blindly authoritarian and hierarchical as any Japanese business pretending to be an educational institute, with most teachers content to parlay a career as a bureaucratic functionary rather than a dedicated educator. I had 22-year-old teachers (born after I had been a teacher-trainer in Japan for decades) ordering me to stand in the corner of the classroom while the kids listened to their teacher's explanation of English grammar and waiting for my cue to pronounce a word correctly like a Kathy-Chatty Doll-on-Demand.
Elementary school-aged kids generally liked English classes, and the teachers were a bit better, but by the time the kids finished Jr. High, most had become allergic to the rote memorization and competing in standardized testing associated with English. What they were more likely to pick up on is the social hierarchy. No matter how old, educated, experienced, Japanese-fluent, or fun the foreigner ... the foreigner's role in the classroom and institution would quickly be seen as little more than a disposable tool, commanded by even the most incompetent Japanese teacher.
But during the 8 years I was unemployed and seeking to build connections and start one of the many "alternative" schools at the local level, I repeatedly encountered a phenomenon that can best be described through the lens of ponerology.
I had assumed that the many would-be alternatives to the public school system and further institutionalization in higher education were driven by idealists and educators of goodwill such as myself. While there may be such schools, I have yet to run across them. Rather, the would-be alternatives are more likely to be driven by parents trying to leverage their children into family businesses. Hiding under the cloak of "concerned parents" fighting the system, they are more likely to be entrepreneurial start-up businesses using their own children as their primary resource ... with their only qualifications being their newly formed status as parents and what they can quickly copy-paste and market from online resources. Not so different from the deluge of would-be novelists prompting ChatGPT to write and publish a book for them.
Not to blow my horn ... but my decades here in Japan have included graduate school in Education ... an educational trouble-shooter and teacher trainer for universities ... research, publication, and presentations in three countries ... consistently popular classes ... heavily active in introducing and joining students in community outreach projects ... more than a decade-long stint as a judge for several "Ivy League" college English speech contests ... one of only two native speakers of English working for the Ministry of Education's English textbook committee ... yadda, yadda, yadda.
My reason for mentioning the above is that although my professional background is known among the local community here in a Tokyo bed town ... other than perhaps a lunch meeting as an advisor to help those parent startups get started, my resources remain untapped and are kept at a calculated distance. Just as institutions in Japan are reluctant to hire anyone more capable of doing the work of those doing the hiring ... the priority of most 'alternative schools' in Japan is not to create alternative opportunities for students. Such schools are seen as an opportunity to create alternative for-profit businesses, with students as just another expendable resource — including their own children. The notorious "Hollywood stage mother" is just a difference in degree.
Similar but more severe social dynamics are now playing out in Korea, particularly with their "Hagwon" cram schools. YouTube is full of horror stories about naive educators (mostly English teachers from English-speaking countries), and their relationship with such legal and institutional fictions posing as schools.
No wonder Japan is in both an economic AND a demographic freefall. I am pessimistic that any legal structures or institutions can be built to protect people from themselves. Without attempting to define "psychopathy", I have to reluctantly admit that it is the law and institutions where high-functioning opportunists are most likely to thrive, and largely succeed — but at the cost of the more noble possibilities and the best of humanity. Even if psychopathy were defined well enough to make a regulatory agency, it would soon be just like the FDA or CDC, a game of musical chairs for the cleverest of the bunch.
Ha. I remember when the Ministry of Education mandated colleges and universities to create a committee to investigate and minimize academic harassment (power harassment) of faculty which belong to a minority. As the lone foreigner at my college, I thought I would finally be on a committee (if not chair it) with which I was the most qualified. Wrong. The same bureaucrats in charge of other committees and responsible for keeping the foreigner and part-time teachers in their place were put on the committee, and I was not even invited to be a member. The mandate was rubber-stamped as a show of compliance to the Ministry, and that was that. Ahh ... memories. 😂
Despite it all, cheers from a community/societal drop-out from Japan Inc.
I hear you Steve, it's so easy to become an introvert, when seeing the huge difference between being anti-social and anti-socialist. The compelling forces of fascism or communism are always collectivist and bureaucratic by dent of of overwhelming the sensibilities of many outspoken individuals. How do parents give their children a proper education when their own education was lacking the spiritual aspects of truth and harmony with themselves or their neighbors? It is the full gauntlet of human emotions, verses those who cut themselves off from any feeling. It seems to go to extremes with a lot of people following the "leader" but not able to overcome as one author posted about "The strange but authentic inability to think" in the context of the Nuremberg trials. Finding myself in the duel rolls of perpetual student of life, and perpetual educator in life balances me out to knowing that whatever my experiences, I still have much to learn.
I question this: "A popularization of accurate information about PPPs would help mitigate another problem." Unfortunately the "toxic masculinity" propaganda shows that it could be used to demonize anybody, and would probably be used by the PPP.
I raised another point in an earlier post, that one PPP that I encountered in work could project some kind of instinctive energy that was internally disruptive to me, and for some could be almost paralyzing. In other words, the energy generated an instinctive reaction in the target. Dr. Mitchell, as a second research volume, needs to interview victims and determine how to measure that presumably electromagnetic energy being emitted.
Another gap in our knowledge is how a psychopathic parent might game the system (family courts, child protective services, etc.) to further their agenda, whether it be to control/exploit/torment their children and/or their spouse.
Hi, found a typo : "safeguards in place organisatinoally to prevent".
Thanks for this article, my personal experience being raised by a single mother (nobody whatsoever to keep her in check) was mindblowing... The amount of "unintended" harm it can do is quite stagering !
The PPP sees the personal freedom, internal or external (emphasis on internal), of their husband or wife as a direct threat.
This is such a terrible thing, because of the purety, (unconditional or conditional) of a normal parents love for their child.
Children engage in divide and conquer tactics, but so too do dark personality parents and then some. And it is not free-those who embrace conversive thinking have a hatred and vengence festering quite great.
"PPP’s* success in fooling people, which can appear at times to be almost supernatural. "
I found it very interesting that the senior psychiatrist at the local asylum for the criminally insane showed definite signs of psychopathy. That's a profession where people are specifically educated and tasked with identifying psychopaths. He really let that mask slip in front of both me and my parents. He knew we were helpless.
He was way too intelligent and experienced for me to attribute it to naive outrage. It's one thing where jail warden are vindictive and calloused, but this psychiatrist relished the situation. He smiled about what he was doing.
I would have chalked it up to disarming friendliness until I reflected: This man has decades of experience. He knew I was being set up for beatings and rapes. His demeanor was not someone angrily vindictive. He was relaxed and relished the situation.
How does such a man become a key figure in a psychiatric institution?
Adult children of alcoholics and/OR dysfunctional families are like a final frontier. If western societies don't address the paychic harm on generation after generation of people directly affected by or who have participated in world and civil wars or abuse by terrorist fanatical terrorists, gangs, family honor killings by Sharia law practicing Moslems m, we just throw fuel on the fires of evil over and over again.
People made excuses for veterans of WWII who became husbands and fathers but the ptsd from the wars since WWII has grown exponentially. So has the ptsd of growing up in the violent life-denying air of the hoods of major US cities. People will act out their ptsd on whatever persons are weaker. We are like chimps. The churches all talk about love. I don't see how they are helping the abused or the abusers unless people seek help through religion or social organizations.
I attend ACA and ACOA mtgs. I can't recommend them enough. I hear horror stories all the time and wonder how I could have been so adversely affected by parents who were by comparison, basically good people - or so I thought (they were).
Why constantly focusing on the psychopaths that hurt us, we’d better focus on ourselves, reflect and wonder why so few people have power over mass! Why are we slaves of others, why do we not take our lives into our own hands, decide how we govern, etc.
The problem is not the other in this case (dominance by an elite) but ourselves. It is up to us to reverse the disastrous situation, saying that we do not even do it for the good of our children says a lot about our dependency condition. Freedom is won, there is no other way, but we must believe that after more than 4 years of misery it is not enough.
Why do most of the posts just complain about an elite unable to dominate anyone, don’t we understand (globally) that it is us who have set up this diabolical plan, they thought but without us it could not have happened, laxity and who knows what other reasons we are enslaved to this point.
It’s amazing how we like to complain, to dump on others...without defending ourselves and especially our families.
This illustrates how difficult this personality type is. Training in how to spot such people and how to handle them is indeed the most important defensive action that could be taken.
9 times out of 10, when I have talked to people about my father's neglectful treatment of me, their first reaction is to make excuses for him and indicate, subtly, that I am exaggerating or am partly responsible for my treatment, "It can be a thankless task raising a boy", "I'm sure he did his best", "All families are a bit dysfunctional" etc etc. If they say these things to me, an adult man, you can imagine the kinds of denial and victim blaming that children get when they complain about how they are treated at home. It's alienating at best, literally maddening at worst being told by any adult one might dare to open up to that you are exaggerating or being unfair to a parent when that parent is a furtive monster.
That’s really infuriating. Damn.
People can't help but picture their own parents when one speaks the words "father" or "mother". If they had a decent parent, that parent is powerfully signified on hearing the word. I have a feeling that perhaps people unconsciously feel that to condemn my parent, to give me the benefit of the doubt, is to also condemn their own parents, or perhaps their memories of their own childhood. "Parents always try their best". Another very common response is from those that had neglectful parents but denied the reality of their abuse early, these are the ones that are want to say, "Well, I was beaten but it never did me any harm", "I was a tearaway and deserved it" or, best of all, "It made me the man I am today".
All great points.
The most perfidious forms of that heartless behaviour you will meet in "medical professionals", the kind quick to throw "hypersensitive", "oversensitive", and "perceived [injustice, slights, ...] at the face of every victim disturbing them by trying to share to them their pains.
"Such people do not believe such allegations because the distance between what they think is possible and what they are presented with is too great. This results in cognitive dissonance and the attempt to create a suitable rationalization to retain one’s previous yet faulty worldview."
There is an aspect of projection to this. The disbelief presented in the face of verifiable evidence, is routinely expressed as "What reason could they have for doing x, they have nothing to gain from it?" That response originates from projecting a personal motivational framework onto the range of options the DT type operates under.
Yep, that’s our biggest problem, IMO. Projecting our own qualities onto those who lack them.
"We don't see the world as it is; we see it as we are." -- Anais Nin
> “key academics and researchers in the field of DP are themselves of DP” and that these researchers “actively engage in tactics to block the kind of research undertaken in this study, preventing accurate research from being published.”
Woah! Of course, this makes sense when one realizes that consider themselves "a group of special people" and a percentage of them seek their own well-being by way of their group's well-being... A full-on pathocracy being the quintessence of this tendency.
We really need to raise awareness of the fact that such people(?) are among us and not not like us.
(I put the question mark after people(?) because I suspect that a key reason psychopaths manage to hide so well among us is that we presume all people are more or less like us, and so resist including entities so different from us into our "people" category, and hence deny accepting that they are real. Might it be easier to persuade people of the existence of a not-people-like-us-but-look-like-people category?)
This is the whole ball of wax. We should all watch "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" again; or review some of Shakespeare's villains.
Or read the Old Testament. Even the good guys are often terrible.
Hi again Jerome (and Harrison).
Your description of the group dynamics of institutions makes perfect sense. A recent substack I read (can't remember who) began with a quote from Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" — "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
A recent series of A.I.-driven YouTube podcasts is good at describing this as an emergent phenomenon common to all systems, even among more neurotypical people ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brj9c451zMQ.
Joseph Tainter, in his "The Collapse of Complex Societies," makes a similar argument, but I think both Tainter and the podcast above are emphasizing one side of a coin, which is dangerous because no one is held accountable for their behavior. I have a similar problem reconciling Sapolsky's vision of our lack of free will ... https://annas-archive.org/md5/f2e01aefbd4db1d7fc1b6d11272e59f2
Lobaczewski, Mitchell, and others Harrison is covering so well, covers the other side of the coin ... but in reconciling sociopathic behavior to a largely genetically determined disorder, we are still left struggling to reconcile moral autonomy and accountability ... and find ourselves navigating a more sophisticated version of the fable of the scorpion and the frog ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog.
The subconscious group dynamics on one side of a coin, and genetic determinism on the other, leave us with little wiggle room for personal growth, moral autonomy, and personal accountability. I am not comfortable with that coin ... but don't want to go with digital cash either. Destined to remain poor. 😂
And the recent iteration of the podcast Vsauce2 presented a fairly balanced intro into psychopathy, though just an intro ... and doesn't begin to explore into the political ramifications of resulting group dynamics ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7haxkYwAaU.
You raise a very good question about what it means to be "people" and a human ... a question that I think should be the raison d'etre of education as a never-ending process of maturation. Biologically, an empathy-driven neurotypical individual can mate and produce offspring with Cluster B types, so I guess they are still 'human' ... but that really begs for a finer distinction of the word "species", similar to how absurd it is to imagine a chihuahua trying to mount a golden retriever in heat.
Just a guess, but in the same way Carl Jung proposed UFOs as a metaphor for what was once called witches or sorcery in the pre-industrial era, I've increasingly come to think of the "lizard people" (of early David Icke fame), "Snakes in Suits", or reptilian-like aliens as subconscious metaphors, projections ... an intuitive assumption that some behavior we all have to a small degree such as the narcissistic preening before a date, the machiavellian opportunism of a job interview or making a sale, etc. When observed in others exceeding a tipping point of empathetic norms, collectively, we co-create these 'monsters of the id' ... partially as our own subconscious brake on our own capacity for evil.
Beyond the H.G. Wells "Morlock / Eloi" distinction of future humans, I can't help but to imagine other fictions of evil ... predatory vampires, blindly consuming zombies, and aliens of various ilk as an artistically therapeutic "othering" of our own potential for sociopathic behavior ... otherwise we would not be able to distinguish the bad from the good characters.
The distinction is blunt at the lowest common denominator, maybe a white-hat / black-hat Western or a children's superhero cartoon. But as the consumer of art matures and begins self-therapy through creative art themselves, the anti-hero or more complex characters are more likely to emerge as a Taoist Yin-Yang whole or may leave the art consumer in a reflective state of trying to reconcile the should and should not within themselves.
a heads up to another buddy struggling to resolve these same issues through his own art ... https://doesnotplaywellwithothers.substack.com/p/novel-excerpt
Just trying to clear my head over another cup of coffee on a spring morning in Japan.
Cheers!
Hi Harrison.
I've been too busy to keep up with all of the postings thus far, but I thought I'd weigh in on a psychopathic angle I am increasingly aware of here in Japan.
Living in Japan for 43 years now, most of which was spent unsuccessfully trying to navigate the petty politics of Japanese academic institutions (mostly colleges), I finally resigned in protest from a tenured position 10 years ago at age 59 ... and spent 2 of the last 10 years as an Assistant Language Teacher rotating between 12 public schools for elementary and Jr. High school aged kids. Those public schools were just as blindly authoritarian and hierarchical as any Japanese business pretending to be an educational institute, with most teachers content to parlay a career as a bureaucratic functionary rather than a dedicated educator. I had 22-year-old teachers (born after I had been a teacher-trainer in Japan for decades) ordering me to stand in the corner of the classroom while the kids listened to their teacher's explanation of English grammar and waiting for my cue to pronounce a word correctly like a Kathy-Chatty Doll-on-Demand.
Elementary school-aged kids generally liked English classes, and the teachers were a bit better, but by the time the kids finished Jr. High, most had become allergic to the rote memorization and competing in standardized testing associated with English. What they were more likely to pick up on is the social hierarchy. No matter how old, educated, experienced, Japanese-fluent, or fun the foreigner ... the foreigner's role in the classroom and institution would quickly be seen as little more than a disposable tool, commanded by even the most incompetent Japanese teacher.
But during the 8 years I was unemployed and seeking to build connections and start one of the many "alternative" schools at the local level, I repeatedly encountered a phenomenon that can best be described through the lens of ponerology.
I had assumed that the many would-be alternatives to the public school system and further institutionalization in higher education were driven by idealists and educators of goodwill such as myself. While there may be such schools, I have yet to run across them. Rather, the would-be alternatives are more likely to be driven by parents trying to leverage their children into family businesses. Hiding under the cloak of "concerned parents" fighting the system, they are more likely to be entrepreneurial start-up businesses using their own children as their primary resource ... with their only qualifications being their newly formed status as parents and what they can quickly copy-paste and market from online resources. Not so different from the deluge of would-be novelists prompting ChatGPT to write and publish a book for them.
Not to blow my horn ... but my decades here in Japan have included graduate school in Education ... an educational trouble-shooter and teacher trainer for universities ... research, publication, and presentations in three countries ... consistently popular classes ... heavily active in introducing and joining students in community outreach projects ... more than a decade-long stint as a judge for several "Ivy League" college English speech contests ... one of only two native speakers of English working for the Ministry of Education's English textbook committee ... yadda, yadda, yadda.
My reason for mentioning the above is that although my professional background is known among the local community here in a Tokyo bed town ... other than perhaps a lunch meeting as an advisor to help those parent startups get started, my resources remain untapped and are kept at a calculated distance. Just as institutions in Japan are reluctant to hire anyone more capable of doing the work of those doing the hiring ... the priority of most 'alternative schools' in Japan is not to create alternative opportunities for students. Such schools are seen as an opportunity to create alternative for-profit businesses, with students as just another expendable resource — including their own children. The notorious "Hollywood stage mother" is just a difference in degree.
Similar but more severe social dynamics are now playing out in Korea, particularly with their "Hagwon" cram schools. YouTube is full of horror stories about naive educators (mostly English teachers from English-speaking countries), and their relationship with such legal and institutional fictions posing as schools.
No wonder Japan is in both an economic AND a demographic freefall. I am pessimistic that any legal structures or institutions can be built to protect people from themselves. Without attempting to define "psychopathy", I have to reluctantly admit that it is the law and institutions where high-functioning opportunists are most likely to thrive, and largely succeed — but at the cost of the more noble possibilities and the best of humanity. Even if psychopathy were defined well enough to make a regulatory agency, it would soon be just like the FDA or CDC, a game of musical chairs for the cleverest of the bunch.
Ha. I remember when the Ministry of Education mandated colleges and universities to create a committee to investigate and minimize academic harassment (power harassment) of faculty which belong to a minority. As the lone foreigner at my college, I thought I would finally be on a committee (if not chair it) with which I was the most qualified. Wrong. The same bureaucrats in charge of other committees and responsible for keeping the foreigner and part-time teachers in their place were put on the committee, and I was not even invited to be a member. The mandate was rubber-stamped as a show of compliance to the Ministry, and that was that. Ahh ... memories. 😂
Despite it all, cheers from a community/societal drop-out from Japan Inc.
steve
I hear you Steve, it's so easy to become an introvert, when seeing the huge difference between being anti-social and anti-socialist. The compelling forces of fascism or communism are always collectivist and bureaucratic by dent of of overwhelming the sensibilities of many outspoken individuals. How do parents give their children a proper education when their own education was lacking the spiritual aspects of truth and harmony with themselves or their neighbors? It is the full gauntlet of human emotions, verses those who cut themselves off from any feeling. It seems to go to extremes with a lot of people following the "leader" but not able to overcome as one author posted about "The strange but authentic inability to think" in the context of the Nuremberg trials. Finding myself in the duel rolls of perpetual student of life, and perpetual educator in life balances me out to knowing that whatever my experiences, I still have much to learn.
I question this: "A popularization of accurate information about PPPs would help mitigate another problem." Unfortunately the "toxic masculinity" propaganda shows that it could be used to demonize anybody, and would probably be used by the PPP.
I raised another point in an earlier post, that one PPP that I encountered in work could project some kind of instinctive energy that was internally disruptive to me, and for some could be almost paralyzing. In other words, the energy generated an instinctive reaction in the target. Dr. Mitchell, as a second research volume, needs to interview victims and determine how to measure that presumably electromagnetic energy being emitted.
Another gap in our knowledge is how a psychopathic parent might game the system (family courts, child protective services, etc.) to further their agenda, whether it be to control/exploit/torment their children and/or their spouse.
"For many without such knowledge, the exposure of a PPP can have some strange effect"
Knowledge isn't the main thing these *many* don't have.
Please expand on this! I am curious.
Okay, I’ll up the ante. How do we categorize the adults who trained and filmed the young girl in this video from 2016? https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/1572832/kid-hacks-head-off-a-doll-in-chilling-footage-released-by-isis-of-their-cubs-of-the-caliphate/
And, what do you imagine she’s up to, nearly a decade later?
Hi, found a typo : "safeguards in place organisatinoally to prevent".
Thanks for this article, my personal experience being raised by a single mother (nobody whatsoever to keep her in check) was mindblowing... The amount of "unintended" harm it can do is quite stagering !
Apologies, Olivier, but I had to bite: I think the word you intended was “staggering”. ;-)
this is why parents fight over children's sport ball and flog kids into sports
The PPP sees the personal freedom, internal or external (emphasis on internal), of their husband or wife as a direct threat.
This is such a terrible thing, because of the purety, (unconditional or conditional) of a normal parents love for their child.
Children engage in divide and conquer tactics, but so too do dark personality parents and then some. And it is not free-those who embrace conversive thinking have a hatred and vengence festering quite great.
"PPP’s* success in fooling people, which can appear at times to be almost supernatural. "
I found it very interesting that the senior psychiatrist at the local asylum for the criminally insane showed definite signs of psychopathy. That's a profession where people are specifically educated and tasked with identifying psychopaths. He really let that mask slip in front of both me and my parents. He knew we were helpless.
He was way too intelligent and experienced for me to attribute it to naive outrage. It's one thing where jail warden are vindictive and calloused, but this psychiatrist relished the situation. He smiled about what he was doing.
I would have chalked it up to disarming friendliness until I reflected: This man has decades of experience. He knew I was being set up for beatings and rapes. His demeanor was not someone angrily vindictive. He was relaxed and relished the situation.
How does such a man become a key figure in a psychiatric institution?
*PPP = Persistent Predatory Personality
Adult children of alcoholics and/OR dysfunctional families are like a final frontier. If western societies don't address the paychic harm on generation after generation of people directly affected by or who have participated in world and civil wars or abuse by terrorist fanatical terrorists, gangs, family honor killings by Sharia law practicing Moslems m, we just throw fuel on the fires of evil over and over again.
People made excuses for veterans of WWII who became husbands and fathers but the ptsd from the wars since WWII has grown exponentially. So has the ptsd of growing up in the violent life-denying air of the hoods of major US cities. People will act out their ptsd on whatever persons are weaker. We are like chimps. The churches all talk about love. I don't see how they are helping the abused or the abusers unless people seek help through religion or social organizations.
I attend ACA and ACOA mtgs. I can't recommend them enough. I hear horror stories all the time and wonder how I could have been so adversely affected by parents who were by comparison, basically good people - or so I thought (they were).
Why constantly focusing on the psychopaths that hurt us, we’d better focus on ourselves, reflect and wonder why so few people have power over mass! Why are we slaves of others, why do we not take our lives into our own hands, decide how we govern, etc.
The problem is not the other in this case (dominance by an elite) but ourselves. It is up to us to reverse the disastrous situation, saying that we do not even do it for the good of our children says a lot about our dependency condition. Freedom is won, there is no other way, but we must believe that after more than 4 years of misery it is not enough.
Why do most of the posts just complain about an elite unable to dominate anyone, don’t we understand (globally) that it is us who have set up this diabolical plan, they thought but without us it could not have happened, laxity and who knows what other reasons we are enslaved to this point.
It’s amazing how we like to complain, to dump on others...without defending ourselves and especially our families.
This illustrates how difficult this personality type is. Training in how to spot such people and how to handle them is indeed the most important defensive action that could be taken.