The kindhearted psychopath
Declassified files 1.
There are some people who enjoy causing misery to others. They, however, will never lit the fire of anyone’s misery.
These people have mastered, almost to perfection, the art of bringing the necessary oxygen to encourage others, or worse, to encourage those affected to light the fire that makes them burn in their own misery.
As never before causing misery in others has been celebrated so much as an act forced to appear as the free choice of others to self inflict misery on themselves. Meanwhile, someone, joyfully and undercover, has created the conditions for some people self-inflicted misery.
These kinds of undisclosed psychopaths leech on the principle of individual freedom and the right to personal self-determination:
“Whatever harm you cause to yourself is your own making and your sole responsibility.”
The ideal moral paradise for these types of psychopaths is not just to hide their indirect deeds, but to force them to actually appear as acts of kindness.
I do send my love to these undisclosed psychopaths and hope they change their philosophy before causing harm to themselves.
Declassified files 2.
There are good people, decent people, who can even be branded as champions of kindness. They, however, chose to live on the edge of their own moral values but undercover since for them it is very important to appear good and likable.
Yet, when things reached a certain level of moral tension that jeopardizes their moral integrity, they tell us with a layback smile on their face that “it is all a joke” while side by side makes themselves sharply valuable to society.
We are not talking here about criminal record yet, and not even about people considered publicly or by their colleges and friends as non-grata. On the contrary, we are talking about a person who still fully enjoy the values of his/her greatly coveted merits in society to have a sassy virtual insurance policy for their undisclosed and undercover edgy moral ambivalence.
We could perfectly say that this new boy in the block, yep, it is a “boy”, a cis-boy with strong residual gender markers, is the exact replica of the nice guy, its revenge side, as a cis nerd with a soyboy macho demeanor.
We no longer have the Brandos, the James Deans, the Mickey Rourkes, the Downey Jrs. playing in real life the roles of bad boys while delivering on-screen amazing raw, edgy characters.
We have now sanitized “Auteurs” in real life and “method acting” experts on screen. “Auteurs” are both, those who expertly mimic simulated acts on the screen and those who create acts and models of behavior that can be emulated in a reality completely curated by political correctness. We could call this process de-marlonbrandization of cinema and of reality.
It is not so much that cinema has merged with reality, but rather that they have both initiated a temporal truce of peace in which they cheat on each other mindfully, beautifully, slick-ciously.
Cinema cheats with its ultra-polished “method acting” in which acting is no longer acting, but “living” the experience of acting through and through.
Meanwhile, reality, cinema, actors and actresses, cheats on us with a sense of cocooned risk and rawness, as much in reality as in cinema, which has nothing of risk nor of rawness.
Enough of Hollywood, Silicone Valley is the new horizon. We no longer have the geeky hackers or the Wozniaks educators outcasts delivering computer wizardries from untrackable garages.
Those were the nerd, the Max Cohens from Aronofsky’s Pi, highly valued by the system, but completely out of synch with the system. Those were the time when Alan Cooper wrote: “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum…” fearing that a bunch of super intelligent lunatic nerds would take over America’s corporate and high finance world.
But fear not. Welcome to usury’s Nerderland. Computer nerds have found their yin for their yan inside their yin or their yan even when it is all mere Silicone Valley’s corporate perks and nirvana psychobabble hype that hardly ever touches the nail toes of any divine experience or human suffering even when it appears to deliver kindness and spiritual highs in copious amounts.
Ask James Damore, former moral virtuoso and Google senior engineer, how he got spun out of Google ideological echo chamber and if he ever enjoyed the perks at La Playa in Black Rock City.
This is not about DeVos’ Amway’s mumbo-jumbo compassionate capitalism nor about the psychopathic Tech failure of Elizabeth Holmes who presented herself as the new female Steve Jobs. This not about Patrick Bateman’s American Psycho, nor Louis Bloom’s Nightcrawler, nor Anton Chigurh’s No Country for Old Men.
This is about people who are genuinely kind and honest, but who are so spontaneously, while at heart are morally disenfranchised by the nature of their professions and mostly and sometimes exclusively care about their skills, their merits and just how to be useful to themselves and society primarily obeying their own narrow self-interest.
Sadly, it often goes further. For them, it is like an adrenaline rush they can’t live without. They indulge in such edgy morality on condition of not violating a certain personal code of conduct or, to put it bluntly, as a result of being able to afford not violating a certain personal code of conduct, usually exclusively related to that which they are technically extremely good at.
These kind of people are mostly really good at one thing and just one thing. They are so good to the point that even when they are mediocre at many others things they make others feel as if they were good at many other things just for the cheering fact that they are extremely good at one thing that is in high demand. In that sense, skills alone are able to create charm and charisma.
In these people, the concept of “transferable” skills becomes so ubiquitous that the wishy-washy wannabe DaVinci type in them get, by cheer mental empathy, a fast-growing upgrade.
These people are not bullies, sociopaths or narcissists, but they can slowly and surely become one even without no one noticing. They are extremely good at making most people see and judge them as good people and as champions of kindness. Yet, undercover, they like to play with the ambivalence of being bullies, sociopaths, and narcissists without actually being one, but rather being it as a joke, and alongside playing the ultimate joke of not being even clear if it is a joke.
These people love this kind of edgy moral ambivalence not because they have dark forces inside them, but simply because they get a kick out of playing on a moral edge while fully staying on the side of good.
It is as if forces inside them were looking to reestablish a balance out of such much discipline and good character on one side.
These people are competitive and ambitious, but also kindhearted and well behaved. They are actually nice people and yet, they don’t like such label and, in fact, they don’t like any label that corners them into the image of a “nice” person.
Let’s repeat one more time, these people are good, nice people but just with an edge for the morally sarcastic. This is the kind of sarcasm in which we never know if they are serious or joking for things they consider irrelevant while for things they consider relevant they remain sharply clear-cut.
You might fairly wonder, how these people can be good and nice if they are highly sarcastic? Isn’t sarcasm, charm, and intelligence the key ingredients of a sociopath and of a narcissist?
Well, the accurate answer here is, yes and no, or rather, it depends. They are usually not sarcastic at all for the things they provide a valuable service to society and particularly for themselves. Their highly valuable contribution in one field of competence, allows them to use their other secondary faculties in a sarcastic manner.
The base of their flamboyant sarcasm is on a non-contractual payoff for being such a valuable asset to others in other aspects of life. However, this unwritten social contract is not done over an easy silent truce.
To be able to have the charm of sarcasm while you are an extremely valuable asset to others, your sarcasm can’t be a complete train wreck in a kind of pyrrhic payoff.
For one to remain a good character while being morally edgy, one part of our other faculties have to be at the service of us as valuable assets, but another part can be free to play with the ambivalence of being relatively indifferent and, even sometimes, jokingly opposed to us as a valuable asset and as a “nice” person to others.
This kind of moral tendency to sociopathic behavior can’t be confused with the actual sociopathic behavior and it shouldn’t either be confused with a general natural human quality of our behavior that gets triggered when we are ambitious and competitive.
But do you seriously think this is fundamentally a psychological problem? The fact that some people are able to reach the pinnacle of human excellence and offer to others not only something that they dearly need but something that they crave and worship is not just because it can be the case that those who worship are dumb or ignorant, but also because it can be the case that those who worship trust too much the expert specialists and take their rationality as the highest form of enlightenment.
When we worship reason, excellence and merits we have a natural inclination to consent idiotically to anything outside of such excellence and merits when excellence and merits overwhelm us in benefits.
Reason and excellence are never universal in a rigorous way but rather locally universal in a rigorous way. In other words, only a universality that is determined and concrete can be said to be rigorous. Yet, each of us as a whole can’t be said to be universally rigorous and consistent, but for each high-end excellence that we reached we tend to take it as a model not just of the best of us but of us.
If you ever wanted to know how good people get severely corrupted even without ever being caught and how good people deviate towards a kind of wrongdoing that is poisoned by the very high merits of their good deeds, don’t search in the darkest regions of their minds, but there were they have been at the highest peak of reason and of their excellence.
