FEBRUARY2007
©2005 elliott rader •
all rights reserved
psychopathic
symptoms are gaining space in modern life
Excerpts from The
Return of the Puppet Masters
By Carl Zimmer
The psychopath's ability to
confuse and dominate a normal person is based, I think,
on something similar to what happens to a mouse when it
senses a cat nearby.Millions of years of evolution have
built a defense mechanism into the mouse that makes it
stay as far away from cats and other predators as
possible. Experiments have shown that a bacteria
can shift that defense mechanism and maybe even turn it
off.
In any event, what is observed is that if a mouse does
not manage to stay clear of the cat, it freezes, which
may be an evolutionary survival strategy: play dead and
the cat will go away since cat's like to play with their
food before eating it.
Well, what if there is a real inbuilt evolutionary
survival mechanism in human beings similar to that in
animals that - under proper conditions - would warn us
about psychopaths, but for various reasons having to do
with social and religious programming, does not? We
are so completely programmed to believe that anybody that
looks like a human being IS a fully functional human
being with a full complement of all the attributes of
same, including conscience. But what if there is
some part of us that still operates on the evolutionary
survival instincts which we manage to suppress most of
the time, but now and again is triggered by certain
behaviors of psychopaths? And when it is triggered, a
whole cascade of other functions come into play? Let's
look at what Lobaczewski says about the "special
talents" of the psychopath:
In spite of their deficiencies as regards normal psychological and moral knowledge, they develop and then have at their disposal a knowledge of their own, something lacked by people with a natural worldview.
They learn to recognize each other in a crowd as early as childhood, and they develop an awareness of the existence of other individuals similar to them.
They also become conscious of being different from the world of those other people surrounding them. They view us from a certain distance, take a paraspecific variety.
Natural human reactions - which often fail to elicit interest because they are considered self-evident - strike psychopaths as strange and therefore interesting, even comical. They therefore observe us, deriving conclusions, forming their different world of concepts.
They become experts in our weaknesses and sometimes effect heartless experiments upon us. … Neither a normal person nor our natural worldview can perceive or properly evaluate the existence of this world of different concepts. ...
Our first contact [with the psychopath] is characterized by a talkative stream which flows with ease and avoids truly important matters with equal ease if they are uncomfortable for the talker. His train of thought also avoids those matters of human feelings and values whose representation is absent in the psychopathic world view. […] From the logical point of view, the flow of thought is ostensibly correct…
The world of normal people whom they hurt is incomprehensible and hostile to them. […] [Life to the psychopath] is the pursuit of its immediate attractions, pleasure and power. They meet with failure along this road, along with force and condemnation from the society of those other incomprehensible people....
In any society in this world, psychopathic individuals and some of the other deviants create a ponerogenically active network of common collusions, partially estranged from the community of normal people. Some inspirational role of the essential psychopathy in this network also appears to be a common phenomenon.
They are aware of being different as they obtain their life experience and become familiar with different ways of fighting for their goals. Their world is forever divided into “us and them” - their world with its own laws and customs and that other foreign world full of presumptuous ideas and customs in light of which they are condemned morally.
Their “sense of honor” bids them cheat and revile that other human world and its values. In contradiction to the customs of normal people, they feel non-fulfillment of their promises or obligations is customary behavior.
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals....
Essential psychopathy has exceptionally intense effects in this manner. Something mysterious gnaws into the personality of an individual at the mercy of the psychopath, and it is fought like a demon. His emotions become chilled, his sense of psychological reality is stifled. This leads to decriterialization of thought and a feeling of helplessness culminating in depressive reactions which can be so severe that psychiatrists sometimes misdiagnose them as a manic-depressive psychosis. Lobaczewski
Now notice particularly this:
They also learn how their personalities can have traumatizing effects on the personalities of those normal people, and how to take advantage of this root of terror for purposes of reaching their goals....
In another place in his book, Lobaczewski talks about the effect of the psychopath on normal human beings in terms of what actually transpires in the brain.
When the human mind comes into contact with this new reality so different from any experiences encountered by a person raised in a society dominated by normal people, it releases psychophysiological shock symptoms in the human brain with a higher tonus of cortex inhibition and a stifling of feelings, which then sometimes gush forth uncontrollably.
Human minds work more slowly and less keenly because the associative mechanisms have become inefficient.
Especially when a person has direct contact with [a psychopath], who use their specific experience so as to traumatize the minds of the “others” with their own personalities, his mind succumbs to a state of short-term catatonia.
The [psychopath's] humiliating and arrogant techniques, brutal paramoralizations, and so forth deaden his thought processes and his self-defense capabilities, and their divergent experiential method anchors in his mind. ...
Only once these unbelievably unpleasant psychological states have passed, thanks to rest in benevolent company, is it possible to reflect, always a difficult and painful process, or to become aware that one’s mind and common sense have been fooled by something which cannot fit into the normal human imagination.
Notice that the psychopath is
able to use his "special knowledge" to "deaden
the thought processes self-defense capabilities"
of the normal person.
Well, what if this is not entirely psychological?
What if certain behaviors trigger the evolutionary
survival mechanism that is part of the older structures
of the brain? What if this paralysis, this
catatonia is similar to the "freezing" of the
mouse when it encounters the cat? What if this is
our "sign," our warning that we are dealing
with a psychopath???
The other thing of note is where Lobaczewski says that,
while the person is "frozen" and effectively
helpless, the "divergent experiential method
anchors in the mind" of the normal person. For
a long time I have noticed this phenomenon which I always
described as "putting psychic hooks" into a
person. This is actually a terrible thing because
it is similar to the cat reaching out with a paw and
holding the mouse down to begin toying with it prior to
eating. In human psychological terms, it serves to
"stall" them, like a frequency that prevents
them from seeing what is being done to them and how or
why. Let's call it the production of a "stalling
frequency," or a "frequency fence" which
includes the paralysis and "anchoring" of
psychophagic concepts in the mind of the normal person
One of the big questions is how to overcoming the
stalling frequency, and , Lobaczewski offers some helpful
information:
If a person with a normal instinctive substratum and basic intelligence has already heard and read about such a system of ruthless autocratic rule “based on a fanatical ideology”, he feels he has already formed an opinion on the subject. However, direct confrontation with the phenomenon causes him to feel intellectually helpless. All his prior imaginings prove to be virtually useless; they explain next to nothing. This provokes a nagging sensation that he and the society in which he was educated were quite naive.
Anyone capable of accepting this bitter void with an awareness of his own nescience, which would do a philosopher proud, can also find an orientation path within this deviant world. However, egotistically protecting his world-view habits from disintegrative disillusionment and attempting to combine them with observations from this new divergent reality only reaps mental chaos. The latter has produced unnecessary conflicts and disillusionment with the new rulership in some people; others have subordinated themselves to the pathological reality. One of the differences observed between a normally resistant person and somebody who has undergone a transpersonification is that the former is better able to survive this disintegrating cognitive void, whereas the latter fills the void with the pathologic propaganda material, and without sufficient controls.....
Notice here that Lobaczewski
mentions that there are people who attempt to combine
their observations of psychopathy with their own world
view, such as attempting to impose their "everyone
has a soul and we just have to figure out what is wrong
with these people and save them" shtick, only end up
being in chaos. It could be said that the same
chaotic state is common to those people who have been in
a state of internal conflict and discomfort when dealing
with psychophages and keep trying to blame themselves or
try to "fix" things.
What is important is that those who have this problem of
internal confusion and chaos are those who probably have
the WILL to resist and that is what the confusion and
chaos is about: the instinctive substratum is screaming:
"PREDATOR" and the conscious mind's programming
is saying "It's not a predator, it is a human being
and I just need to figure out how to fix
him/her." This conflict is what produces the
"extremely unpleasant psychological states"
that Lobaczewski has described: the freezing, the loss of
ability to think, the mental catatonia, followed by the
"anchoring" of psychopathic material.
Notice also that he mentions those that undergo what he
calls "transpersonification." These are
the people in whom the psychopathic material
"anchors" and because they have never been able
to fully accept the reality of what we can plainly call
"evil personified," because they can't let go
of the idea that "all are one" and "we
only need love" or "let's just all get along
and play nice" or "I can fix it" or they
have some emotional investment in preserving the status
quo, then that void is not filled with the TRUTH of the
situation based on FACTS. And so, with a void
inside, they are subject to having that void filled with
pathologic material. They have no controls.
But, getting back to the people who do have a big
conflict and who are capable of the will to resist being
"assimilated, (probably because they have the WILL
in there in the first place), even if they are weary and
scarred from battle, there is much hope because by
dealing with the phenomenon directly, they seem to be
"inoculated." As Lobaczewski describes
it:
Only once these unbelievably unpleasant psychological states have passed, thanks to rest in benevolent company, is it possible to reflect, always a difficult and painful process, or to become aware that one’s mind and common sense have been fooled by something which cannot fit into the normal human imagination.
He also taoks a bit about the value of individuals who have been "inoculated" by first hand experience:
The specific role of certain individuals during such times is worth pointing out; they participated in the discovery of the nature of this new reality and helped others find the right path.
They had a normal nature but an unfortunate childhood, being subjected very early to the domination of individuals with various psychological deviations, including pathological egotism and methods of terrorizing others.
The new rulership system struck such people as a large-scale societal multiplication of what they knew from individual experience. From the very outset, they therefore saw this reality much more prosaically, immediately treating the ideology in accordance with the paralogistic stories well known to them, whose purpose was to cloak bitter reality of their youth experiences. They soon reached the truth, since the genesis and nature of evil are analogous irrespective of the social scale in which it appears.
Such people are rarely understood in happy societies, but there they became useful; their explanations and advice proved accurate and were transmitted to others joining the network of this apperceptive heritage. However, their own suffering was doubled, since this was too much of a similar kind of abuse for one life to handle. ...
Finally, society sees the appearance of individuals who have collected exceptional intuitive perception and practical knowledge in the area of how pathocrats think and such a system of rule operates.
That is what we hope to do here. It seems to me that this is the most important thing to do at this time. As Lobaczewski writes:
Man and society stands at the beginning of a long road of unknown experiences which, after much trial and error, finally leads to a certain hermetic knowledge of what the qualities of the phenomenon are and how best to build up psychological resistance thereto. ....
We shall thereupon observe psychological phenomena, knowledge, immunization, and adaptation such as could not have been predicted before and which cannot be understood in the world remaining under the rule of normal man’s systems.
A normal person, however, can never completely adapt to a pathological system; it is easy to be pessimistic about the final results of this.
Such experiences are exchanged during evening discussions among a circle of friends, thereby creating within people’s minds a kind of cognitive conglomeration which is initially incoherent and contains factual deficiencies. ...
Moral and religious values, as well as a nation’s centuries-old cultural heritage, furnish most societies with support for the long road of both individual and collective searching through the jungle of strange phenomena. However, this apperceptive capacity possessed by people within the framework of the natural world-view contains a deficiency which hides the nucleus of the phenomenon for many years. Under such conditions, both instinct and feelings, and the resulting basic intelligence, play instrumental roles, stimulating man to make selections which are to a great extent subconscious.
Under the conditions created by imposed pathocratic rule in particular, where the just described psychological deficiencies are decisive in joining the activities of such a system, our natural human instinctive substratum is an instrumental factor in joining the opposition. Similarly, the environmental, economic, and ideological motivations which influenced the formation of an individual personality, including those political attitudes which were assumed earlier, play the role of modifying factors which are not as enduring in time. The activity of these latter factors, albeit relatively clear with relation to individuals, disappear within the statistical approach and diminish through the years of pathocratic rule.
The decisions and the way selections made for the side of the society of normal people are once again finally decided by factors usually inherited by biological means, and thus not the product of the person’s option, and predominantly in subconscious processes.
Man’s general intelligence, especially its intellectual level, play a relatively limited role in this process of selecting a path of action, as expressed by statistically significant but low correlation (-0.16). The higher a person’s general level of talent, the harder it usually is for him to reconcile himself with this different reality and to find a modus vivendi within it.
At the same time, gifted and talented people join the pathocracy, and harsh words of contempt for the system can be heard on the part of simple, uneducated people.
Only those people with the highest degree of intelligence, which, as mentioned, does not accompany psychopathies, are unable to find the meaning of life within such a system. They are sometimes able to take advantage of their superior mentality in order to find exceptional ways in which to be useful to others. Wasting the best talents spells eventual catastrophe for any social system.
Since those factors subject to the laws of genetics have proven decisive, society becomes divided by means of criteria not known before into the adherents of the new rule, the new middle class mentioned twice above, and the majority opposition. Since the properties which cause this new division appear in more or less equal proportions within any old social group or level, this new division cuts right through these traditional layers of society. If we treat the former stratification, whose formation was decisively influenced by the talent factor, as horizontal, the new one should be referred to as vertical. The most instrumental factor in the latter is good basic intelligence which, as we already know, is widely distributed throughout all social groups.
Even those people who were the object of social injustice in the former system and then bestowed with another system, which allegedly protected them, slowly start criticizing the latter. Even though they were forced to join the pathocratic party, most of the former prewar Communists in the author’s homeland later gradually became critical, using the most emphatic of language. They were first to deny that the ruling system was Communist in nature, persuasively pointing out the actual differences between ideology and reality. They tried to inform their comrades in still independent countries of this by letters. Worried about this “treason”, these comrades transmitted such letters to their local party, from where these were returned to the security police of the country of origin. The authors of the letters paid with their lives or with years of prison; no other social group was finally subjected to such stringent police surveillance as were they.
So the task before us is clear. It isn't easy, but it is possible.
©2005 elliott rader • all
rights reserved
The average age of
the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred
years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complaceny to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage.
Sir Alex Fraser Tyler: (1742-1813) Scottish jurist and
historian
©2005 elliott rader • all rights reserved