Letting Go

I grow old. I grow old.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prubrock by T. S. Eliot

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One way of knowing one is getting older is by the number of people one knows who are dead. I had a friend whom I have known since the age of 13 and I recently learned she was dead. We met in a nuthouse which had been my home between the ages of 13 and 15. We had been really good friends for years but had drifted apart a few years ago. She was the first person to tell me I was a psychopath. I called her about a year ago as I had just discovered it was possible to get one’s medical records from our years of incarceration. I thought she would be interested and excited at the prospect. She would have been at one time. This time, not so much. I asked her if she remembered telling me I was a psychopath. She denied remembering that and volunteered the information that she wasn’t “impressed by them anymore.” Well, that chilled me and I mentally let her go as a person no longer of any interest to me. It was interesting to see how easily I dismissed her as she had once been really important to me. After a while, I began to miss her and feel nostalgia so I tried to contact her only to find out she was dead. That was kind of a shock as this was the first person (other than parents of course) that I had known from so long ago who was dead. It’s so final.

I had another friend with whom I had been close about 35 to 40 years ago. We were still friends on Facebook but hadn’t really spoken much for years. Just yesterday, she contacted me to question me about my psychopathy. I’ve been “out” on Facebook for over a year so I assumed my old friends knew by now. I have friends on Facebook from many different times in my life with whom I shared different interests. I have a bunch of political friends. The great thing about them is that we can still debate our interests in a rational manner and agree to disagree when necessary. Other friends were gathered from various interests and enthusiasms such as the novels of Anne Rice. These weren’t merely email friends. I actually got together with them over the years. We’re still friends but not as involved with each others’ lives. Then there are friends I’ve made more recently with whom I share the experience of being in Cluster B. I’ve been more involved with them then the others recently and sometimes I forget there’s a world outside our little circle. I love them for their open-mindedness. I can be myself among them in a way I have never before be able to.

This old friend has totally rejected me based solely on my psychopathy. To her credit, she did give me a chance to “explain” but she found my writing “long-winded,” too much trouble to bother reading. Meh!

Well, that’s why psychopaths wear masks. People can’t deal with reality. I can afford not to give a damn at this stage of my life. I can let people go if they can’t accept me. And have room for those who want to be in my life.

Top of the Food Chain

The film, The Psychopath Next Door, has an amusing sequence in which the psychopath is likened to a cat eating a mouse. To make it more amusing, the cat and mouse are working in a corporation. The cat, clearly, is the boss and the mouse, a terrified employee.

The cat’s lack of empathy as he toys with the mouse is stressed.

That’s rather silly. A mouse knows damn well what the cat wants to do to him. He doesn’t try to implant his own values on the cat. He expects and gets no mercy.

Again, the words are Robert Hare’s. These words are more realistic than the ones imputed to the mouse. Cats don’t care what their prey is going through. Note the show of naked power as the cat holds the mouse’s tail down.

Cats love to play with their food, hence the expression, playing “cat and mouse.”

The delicious conclusion.

Robert Hare has illustrated something I’ve always said, myself. Cats are psychopaths, not just because they hunt live prey. Compare them with dogs. Dogs are always looking like they feel guilty. You can’t shame a cat. Just try it. Cats are beautiful, independent and graceful. Mark Twain said that those who love freedom love cats.

Are psychopaths top of the food chain? We take care of ourselves. But, as cats don’t always hunt, we are not always seeking prey. A cat who is fed regularly doesn’t bother hunting mice. But I wouldn’t try having a cat and mouse living together in one house.

Grandiosity Without a “Self?”

selfish or spiritual?

Spirituality isn’t always about sweetness and light. Jung was one of the first to recognize how important embracing one’s dark shadow could be for real spiritual progress. Even standard spirituality can be selfish with it’s focus on the individual reaching enlightenment (except for Bodhisattvas) or salvation. Psychopathy is considered selfishness par excellence whether spiritual or not. Ironically,  we selfish people are noted to not have a strong sense of identity which makes it easier for us to assume whatever identity we need for a particular situation at the moment. I remember having a very vague sense of who I was as a teenager. I looked in the mirror and saw a face that seemed just kind of generic. M.E. Thomas probably named it best as an elastic sense of self.

I got into Eastern mysticism fairly early in life, starting with Alan Watts but moving on to Baba Ram Das and acid. I experienced a mystical awakening where I realized we are all One. (Of course, the nature of mysticism is that is gives one a “truth” that is very private. The experience strikes one as convincing on a mega level but not something easily transmitted to another person. Therefore, I’m only naming this as my experience, not insisting anyone else adopt is as “true.”) Buddhists deny the existence of a soul and Judeo-Christians tout the virtue of selflessness. Almost everyone considers the ego as the antithesis of spirituality. During my love affair with acid, I saw the “ego” during trips as a person trying to guard a very small territory while we really had it all, but for attachment to the ego.

While most people consider psychopaths lowlives, Kevin Dutton wrote The Wisdom of Psychopaths, subtitled What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach us About Success. In this book, he names Saint Paul, “The Patron Saint of Psychopaths.”

To the Jews, I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people. (1 Corinthians 9:20-22)

This reminds me of when I was a kid and belonged to two rival gangs at the same time. I told each one that I was spying on the other when I wanted to go and play with them for a while. My friends and I actually do the same thing on Facebook when we join with psychopath-haters, the so-called “victims” and pretend to be one of them.

Without a strong sense of self, how can we be grandiose?  Zhawq explains

“I do have as strong a sense of being ‘me’ as everybody else, I just cannot relate it to or define it by the social labels and values that mainstream society uses to identify an individual as different from other individuals. In that sense I am the masks I put on, and without a mask I have no real identity as distinguishable from other people’s identities – not outside of my personal inner sense of ‘self’, and without an outside observable identity I don’t really exist.”

I wonder if our grandiosity is attached to a meta-self, a “self” that encompasses our many shifting shapes. I take a great deal of pride in my freedom from any of the bugaboos of society which hold most people in their thrall.

The Blue Oyster Cult wrote a song called I Love the Night which is probably about a man becoming a vampire upon meeting a beautiful vampiress. The song goes, “The day’s OK and the sun can be fun but I live to see those rays slip away.” The beauty of the night is in it’s quiet. I compare the quiet of the night with the quiet of emotions turned down. It’s cool and peaceful to be detached from the clamor of most people’s emotional drama. Perhaps our lack of guilt is related to our flexible sense of self. Most people need to live and act in a way that is consistent with their Self. If myself is fluid, what can really be incompatible? Nothing.

Perhaps my guiltlessness has something to do with the fact that I’m constantly reinventing myself, being reborn. The “me” of yesterday isn’t the “me” of today. I’m constantly standing at a starting point contemplating unlimited possibilities. When people ask what I have done to justify my grandiosity, I am nonplussed by their question. Done? I can do anything. I can be anybody. Like Pinocchio in Stromboli’s theater, I’ve got no strings to hold me down, to make me fret, to make me frown. I am everybody, everything, limitless. Jiminy Cricket must have slept late again. He can’t keep up with me and never will.

 

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Statement of Psychopaths about their Self:

• “If a person has no strong sense of self in general, then of course he will probably have no strong sense of lost integrity when he violates life projects which for the rest of us would be central parts of our self identities. In a nutshell, it’s not that the sociopath lacks moral integrity specifically; he lacks general self identity integrity, of which moral identity integrity is only a possible part. So a lack of, say, a moral conscience, isn’t really the central problem for the sociopath. What’s more at the heart of things is his lack of moral identification, along with the lack of any other significant life identifications.”
  quoted by M.E. Thomas, Sociopath World
• Psychopaths have weak identities in general.  Our only constant is change.  We are chameleons and we wear the personalities of those around us.  I believe that the constant shapeshifting that we engage in leaves us with a very weak sense of identity.  We can state facts about our being but we cannot articulate who the underlying person actually is.  Our identities are like candle flames, dancing in the wind and ever-changing in color and shape.
  Candle Flames…Psychopaths and Identity, Jessica Kelly
• For me there is no clearly defined personality outside of my masks. And I have many. I can to a large extent choose which mask I will put on according to the setting and my purpose with interacting with the people who’s daily stage in life it is, for whom it defines and represents who and what they are.
  zhawq, Psychopathic Writings

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Links

• Buddha is a Psychopath.
• Grandiosity, Part II. Limitless