I was a psychopath in my dreams last night. I looked at the world as a predator. My immediate problem was simply getting in control. And it was simple: you have to secure means of violence, people to support you, and money. A police department is actually one obvious place. If you are going to be a psychopath, hide among those tasked with catching them (like the East Area Rapist). All of these were logistical problems. There were no moral considerations: only practical ones, like what you can get away with, and how you can get away with it.
What I feel is that at true psychopath feels about his or her victims roughly the way a lion does when killing and eating a gazelle: nothing–other than, perhaps, the satisfaction and pleasure of a successful hunt. People exist for them.
But you can’t show this. There is this hidden world, in which an elaborate act is conducted. You can see CLEARLY that the world is yours for the taking, but learn early on that you can only trust this “knowledge” with certain select people, and your trust in them must be earned.
In my own case, what I feel is this is the flip side of my trauma. Trauma sort of resets the psyche, by taking the frontal cortex off-line, or at least off-line intermittently. What is left is much more primitive, and more or less clinically anti-social. If you were to somehow convert a tiger to human form, and grant it speech, it would be a psychopath. Concern for others not of its kind–and for a disconnected human, no one is of his or her kind, other than perhaps some few others dissociated in the same way, like Sade’s group of friends in 120 Days of Sodom, or Leonard Lake and Charles Ng–is simply not something that is present in predators, or at least in most predators, most of the time.
There are grades of dissociation, though. What I feel is that the heart is the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. Morality, honest morality, is based on empathy. It is based on feeling what others feel, and upon wishing them well the same way you wish yourself well. It is based, to some great extent, on connection with others, and viewing their welfare as being as nearly or fully as important as your own. It begins with a primitive sense of your own value, of your own worth, of your own loveability. No one who lacks this sense can spontaneously love others. The model for the love of others is the love of yourself. You cannot be cruel to yourself and genuinely love others.
What makes this confusing is the habit all of us form, to some greater or lesser extent, of pretending. We pretend, to ourselves and others, that we feel what we think are morally appropriate emotions. We cry when we are supposed to cry, feel compassion when we are supposed to feel compassion, say the “right things” when we are supposed to feel the right things. Much of this is simply habit, social habit, which greases the social wheels, but which is disconnected from core truth formally. Some people can be nearly 100% sincere, but others closer to 0%. The outer form will look the same, even if the inner core can be clearly felt by those with the capacity to do so, and the willingness to see what is there, versus what they hope would be there, what they have been taught to feel SHOULD be there, and what would be there, if the people in question were 100% personally integrated.
This is the role of so-called Virtue Signalling. I do think this is a good term for the purported moral activity of vocal leftists. They are not just signalling to the world: they are using their words as an ersatz morality to serve in the place of moral feelings they don’t feel.
To take one concrete example: no one who is perennially enraged can possibly be acting from a place of genuine empathy. It just isn’t possible. Empathy is not something you can just turn on or off. People who are genuinely open and receptive to what is going on in the world are likewise open to the feelings of the people they, at some level, feel might be responsible for some suffering they see.
And this is particularly obvious in large abstractions like “white people”, or “capitalism”. What is happening is that they are reacting in emotionally programmed ways to ideas that are not even remotely the same as people, and which are utterly recalcitrant to being accessed through heart-based affect. What such abstractions are are “PERMISSIONS”, for them. They are permissions to open up the floodgates of horrible, nasty, violent, socially unacceptable emotion.
But there is no empathy there. And I would stipulate that no political or economic philosophy which makes face to face negotiation and understanding between individuals unnecessary or even impossible, can possibly be understood as good.
The value of free markets is that prices are determined locally, between people who at least in theory could know each other.
And the value of what I might call “free market morality”, which is to say the continual negotiation of human relationships based upon a common interest rooted in mutual understanding and empathy, is that it can evolve, and can remain real for long periods of time.
Calcified moral systems, like religions and inflexible philosophies, create the continual opportunity for, and temptation to, hypocrisy, which is to say pretending.
Within my own world, the words YOU MUST, and YOU CAN”T were imprinted on my brain so deeply that they define me in some respects, or at least have.
In my youth I took a deep interest (to the extent such a thing is possible) in the Dada movement, which more or less a structured system of destruction. It is an emotional impulse to tear down.
And I realize now that in my own case I was seeking this psychopathy, because there, at least, the ground is cleared. YOU MUST and YOU CAN’T are gone. Of course, you lose everything else, too, don’t you? But I could not find a choice. Many of us, when we look deeply, cannot find a choice. It eludes us, because certain words and affects are carved into our very souls, or so it seems.
And again, all of this exists at the level of affect. You can say whatever words you want. I know one guy, who was molested by diabolical, evangelical Christians, who has taken to calling himself a “Positive Nihilist”. He is an asshole. He pisses people off and does socially destructive things, as a matter of principle. It does not connect him, and it will never heal him. He is not smart enough to find his way out (I may of course be wrong, and hope I am), but I understand well the problem he is trying to solve, in his own inchoate and ineffective way.
Within my Kum Nye practice they talk continually of finding your way, eventually, to a heart based life. HeartMath, of course, takes that as their starting point. I was feeling some weird anxiety the other day, and did my EmWave2 for 20 minutes, and I really did start to feel an alteration in my felt sense of how and who I am. I stay in my head, because “down there” is just too fucking complicated.
But this dream feels like clear progress. I got what I wanted; now I don’t need it. That is how life works sometimes.
Few thoughts. I don’t know if this makes sense, but some parts of it hopefully do.