I wrote the essay below in 1991 as part of an initiation process into the neo-pagan Church of All Worlds. I had already been a fan of this book. As with Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, I originally read the novel with complete acceptance of it’s message. Later, I found flaws in its logic. The test of great literature is how a reader can grow over a period of years through repeated readings of a single document. The words don’t change but one’s understanding does and the book “changes” with every reading.
Some of the ideas in this novel reflect prejudices of the times in which it had been written. Homophobia and male supremacy are two such ideas which I demolished in the essay of 1991 and won’t bother with now.
One idea in Stranger was, if anything, ahead of it’s time. It appears in New Age thinking in part or in whole. It is frightening, thrilling and challenging. Grokking is an intuitive knowledge of right and wrong that transcends the moral code accepted by society and even logic. When one “groks,” one can act on this superior knowledge unilaterally. Of course, I did think it odd that Michael disappeared cops wielding guns because he grokked the “wrongness” in the guns, tools of killing when he was also killing. Why were guns wrong?
“Thou shalt not kill” is one of the ten commandments in the Bible. Of course, there are oodles of exceptions. Westerners eat meat of animals we have killed. We also kill in war. For centuries, there has been capital punishment. And Western man still believes he is in obedience to that commandment.
I think the real meaning of that rule is one mustn’t kill a fellow citizen except under legally defined circumstances. The real purpose is to promote social cohesion. It wouldn’t do if one could be murdered any time one stepped outside one’s home. Of course, we can kill in self-defense. A cop can kill if there is threat of imminent harm. And, in some places, citizens can be executed.
Michael was spiritually more advanced than the average human being. He had the ability to grok, meaning he had access to knowledge that transcended other forms of human knowledge. This kind of knowledge resembles gnosis. Wikipedia defines “gnosis” as “knowledge of spiritual mysteries.” I define it is “direct knowledge” or knowledge by experience. As a member of OTO, I belong to the Gnostic Catholic Church. Our Bible is called The Book of the Law which is famous for it’s quote: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” which is followed by the less-well-known “love is the law, love under will.” While not quite explicit, this book implicitly lets in the idea that a consciousness that is enlightened enough can be above the law or actually be the law. Murder has existed among humans from Day One but the idea of justifying murder in these terms is newer.
The problem with this is, as I pointed out in 1991, gnosis and grokking are subjective. In a society that depends on some form of consensus, each of us deciding s/he is enlightened and knows when it is ok to kill would open a Pandora’s Box to chaos. I guess that’s why New Age thinkers hint at it rather than enshrine it as doctrine.
The 1960’s was big on individuals acting on their own “conscience” rather than social consensus. The left re-examined the mainstream morality and accused the consensus of genocide and slavery. The war in Vietnam was so full of atrocities, it was criminal according to international law as defined by the United Nations when judging Nazi Germany. Of course, that was the winners of a war judging the losers. When the same criteria was applied to acts of the US and allies, it didn’t sit too well with the national leaders. Left-wing revolutionaries, on the other hand, found it completely logical and consistent to judge the United States by standards of international law.
The Weather Underground Organization declared war on the United States. They claimed the right to replace society’s moral consensus with an alternative system or morality. Unlike Michael Valentine, they, themselves, were a collective. Through criticism/self-criticism, the strove to keep the truest and most ethical standards under which to live and act. They were able, by these means, to judge the United States. Most of the illegal acts of the WUO were mere assaults on property, “armed propaganda,” symbolic. At one point, one of the collectives in WUO decided that everyone who was complicit in the American system, in other words, everyone who wasn’t fighting it, deserved to die just as enemy troops deserved to die. The bomb that killed Diana Oughten, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins has been intended for a military dance. After the accident, the WUO backed away from that position. Today, Bill Ayers says what they did to stop the war in Vietnam was justified but he criticizes himself for being too self-righteous.
What are the rights and responsibilities of the individual in setting a personal standard for morality? As a psychopath, I am a law unto myself (as my mother said of me years ago). I am more “individual” than most people. I don’t really think right and wrong are absolute truths. Of course, a society that hopes to survive must establish rules by which we live together. We can’t just kill whomever or whatever we “grok” is “wrong.” The rules will be broken no matter how much sense they make. They will be broken by empaths as well as psychopaths. Some will kill because they grok wrongness. These people are guided by conscience. Psychopaths can usually see both sides of an issue even if we steadfastly have chosen one side for ourselves.
Crowley stated that “Love is the law, love under will.” The implication is that there is a universal law and everyone doing his “true will” will be automatically in harmony with that law. I think that’s probably true. But is has been my will to go against universal law, to do what is objectively wrong. But does that make my will, not my “true” will? Or is my will as an individual the highest law? It’s my law, anyway.
Some of the Stranger Ideas in
Stranger in a Strange Land
I had already read Stranger when I joined the Church of All Worlds, but as I had enjoyed the book so much the first time and since it is so important in CAW (indeed, are requirement for 3rd circle initiation!), decided to re-read it. It was just as special for me as it had been the first time around, when I was an acid hippy, but not a Pagan. The years have deepened my appreciation of certain ideas and I found myself agreeing with the basic philosophy even more than before.
I was surprised to find some things I had no memory of having read before. I attribute my failure to remember the following to the fact that I was heterosexual when I originally read the book. It is incredible what one doesn’t notice until the shoe pinches. I refer to the homophobia which makes its first appearance on page 303 (Ace Books, 1987):
“Jill … had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok and had given him rules for avoiding passes .. .He had followed her advice and made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had. But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke-fortunately Mike’s male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected than Mike would grok a “wrongness” in the poor in-betweeners, anyhow- they would never be offered water.”
It is a real shame that such a backward idea should find its way into such a progressive book. I realize that these ideas were given to Jill rather than Mike. However, with no disclaimer on Mike’s part, we are forced to conclude that this idea did belong to Robert Heinlein.
Reading most novels, you can usually find a character and say with a great deal of certainty that this is the author. Such is the case with Jubal in Stranger. He is a usually likeable old curmudgeon who is quite chauvinistic. I like him even though I wouldn’t want to be a woman in his household. Goddess forbid that I should be expected to earn respect by “not intrud[ing] into sober talk of men, but [being] quick with food and drink … ” The women in Jubal’s household are nice and perky but the seem to be a cross between nurses and Charlie’s Angels. They are low key and never intrude with any major needs of their own. It is somehow not surprising that Mike sensed that “all young human females had the same face-how could it be otherwise?” So when Dawn was invited to join the household, it was as a secretary (Jubal never asked any of the males if they took shorthand).
It seems that Heinlein had his mystical vision and his chauvinism as well. That’s alright as long as Heinlein keeps his human limitations confined to the character of Jubal. But by hinting that Mike could “grok a wrongness” in gays/lesbians and want to ban them from water brotherhood for that reason alone, Heinlein contaminated the beauty and innocence of that very great character. This viewpoint would affect me personally: by definition, I would not be allowed to join the inner circle.
If CAW is truly a sequel to the CAW in SISL, then I could also be less than acceptable in today’s CAW. Somehow I don’t believe that is possible. But a definite statement from CAW leadership would really help to counteract the ill effect that part of SISL has on all gays/lesbians in CAW. Aside from the way I would be personally affected, the political and philosophical implications contradict the very heart of Mike’s philosophy — or so I grok.
What I find particularly saddening is that I really love the sexual philosophy in SISL except for the anti-gay part. There is great beauty in Jill being “as happily shameless as a tabby in heat” while showing her body to horny men. Indeed, there is no sexual act that occurs between consenting adults which strikes me as wrong in any way, as long as nobody is harmed or exploited. How can someone come to this realization and slam on the brakes the minute same sex relationships are suggested?
Later in the novel I found something even more disturbing in its own way. This is where Michael speaks of killing (or removing) people because he grokked wrongness in them. After the jailbreak, Mike grokked that some criminals were too “vicious” to release with the others:
“So I got rid of them before I got rid of bars and doors. But I have been slowly grokking this whole city for months … and quite a few of the worst were not in jail. I have been waiting, making a list, making sure of fullness in each case. So, now that we are leaving this city—they don’t live here anymore. They were discorporated and sent back to the foot of the line to try again. Incidentally, that was the grokking that changed Jill’s attitude from one of squeamishness to hearty approval: when she finally grokked in fullness that it is impossible to kill a man—that all we were doing was much like a referee removing a player for ‘unnecessary roughness.”
When Jubal asked, “Aren’t you afraid of playing God, lad?” Mike replied, “I am God. Thou art God … and any jerk I remove is God, too.” He “tossed” “about four hundred and fifty” in one night. And then added that this was not really a cure. There was no cure other than “the discipline.”
Holy Shit! Consider the implications! First there is the logical fallacy so broad you
could drive a truck through. If everyone is God, what kind of God is each of us? Could you imagine a world of Old Testament Jehovahs, each passing judgement on everyone else’s right to live, and each executing the sentence of death as he finds appropriate? No. If everyone is God, then everyone is sovereign. No one has the right to kill a sovereign being, except in self defense. If the “jerk” Mike “tossed out of the game” was God; too, then that jerk had the same right Mike had to toss someone out of the game; In other words, if Mike has the right to kill, so does everyone else.
Perhaps Mike does not mean that everyone has the right to kill. Perhaps that is the sole prerogative of those who have achieved enlightenment That would make Mike’s society a benevolent dictatorship. Specifically, it would be a theocracy — a kingdom of God, where God is here on Earth, ruling infallibly (like the Pope) but not merely in matters of Church doctrine. God would rule on matters of life and death. The Catholic Church did rule on matters of life and death once before. We call that time the Inquisition, the Burning Times. They “grokked a wrongness” in witches.
If Mike “tosses out” those in whom he “groks a wrongness,” and if he “groks a wrongness in the poor in-betweeners” (gays), mightn’t he toss us out someday? It would be the logical conclusion. I read somewhere that Charles Manson read and liked SISL. It is easy so see how someone like him could get justification for murder from that passage. Anyone can decide that he is the enlightened being high enough to grok the rightness and wrongness in people and decide to remove them from the game.
Sometimes, especially when the people do something incredibly stupid, I feel it would be really nice if an elite of people who think like I do would run things instead of the democratic majority. Perhaps a benevolent dictatorship, run by the right people, would be better than what we have now. The trouble is that the wrong people get control of the machinery of power. Most of the time I wouldn’t even want people whose ideas I like to run things dictatorially. I don’t really like the idea of being made to do the right thing. I prefer to be free to discover the right thing myself.
Perhaps if the inner circle in SISL were more convincing as enlightened beings, I would be more open to the idea of their ruling. However, the characters in SISL remain the same narrow people they were before they learned Martian. Stinky is just as chauvinistic. Miriam thinks the idea of selling her daughter to make room for a son is cute and funny. Jill thinks gays are fucked up. And so on. I am happy to say that the people in the inner circle of our CAW seem to have a great deal more true wisdom and maturity than those who inhabit the inner circle of Heinlein’s CAW.
So where does this leave us? For all its flaws, Stranger in a Strange Land is a great book. Let us cherish it for all its greatness and forgive its weakness. But let us be sure we don’t mistake those weaknesses for strengths. And above all, let us never make a bible out of SISL or any other book. And let us go on sharing water and grokking the God and Goddess in each other.
Links
- Heinlein on Thelema.
- My Life, Part Five. by me from my autobiography
- Toxic Stigma. also by me
- Wence Came the Stranger. Adam Rostoker. Not the two part essay from the Green Egg. Perhaps I will have to scan it.
- Smug Messiah: Robert A. Heinlein. Jo Walton
California recently legalized pot for recreational users. Today, I went to my first legal dispensary for cannabis. It was an amazing experience.
I looked around the room and saw all those exotic things I had heard of. Candy laced with marijuana. I didn’t have much money so I planned to get two low-price candies. To make a purchase, you have to go into another room. You are asked if you are there for recreational use or medicinal. The we were put on lines appropriate to each. The line was slow moving. I think us recreational users only had one person assisting us. The people around were all very nice. I got to the front to learn that the item I had planned to buy as only for medicinal users. But she was helpful and found candy that didn’t exceed the $10 I had with me.
Now, I’m not necessarily a fan of needlessly labeling people with personality disorders, and I do think psychiatrists tend to diagnose people with personality disorders just because they’re difficult to deal with. At the same time, though, having a framework can help you understand people who have semi-pathological traits and characteristics and can actually make it more tolerable to cope with these people.
There are 3 “Clusters” of personality disorders in the DSM-IV.
Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Histrionic Personality Disorder.
Perhaps my favorite disorder to diagnose in people who are difficult to deal with. Anytime you interact with someone who acts entitled, demanding and superior probably has narcissistic personality traits, if not the full blown disorder. As with all personality disorders, the different between someone with a mild case of asshole-ism versus the full-blown personality disorder is that someone with the personality disorder has such severe characteristics that they are impaired in interpersonal interactions and daily life.
You know that friend you have who’s emotionally needy and clingy one minute, and then pushing you away the next? The type of person who loves you one day and hates you the next? Who’s afraid you’ll leave them but then leaves you first? Who crumples into a pile of tears at a moment’s notice and cuts as a way to cope with emotional pain? Yeah, that friend of yours just might have Borderline Personality Disorder.
It’s hard to miss someone with Histrionic Personality Disorder. She’s usually female, loud, dramatic and attention seeking. She’s sexually provocative way past the point of appropriateness. You may have talked to her at a party or two, but don’t feel like you could ever have a deep or meaningful conversation with her.
When people think of the word “antisocial,” they probably think of a loner-type of person who is shy, doesn’t have a lot of friends, and sits at home playing World of Warcraft instead of trying to find a girlfriend. Antisocial Personality Disorder, though, is a totally different ballgame.
The other night, my partner and I watched an old favorite, 
We found there was only one Cluster C: Max Fabian, the producer, a man suffering with enough anxiety to give him stomach trouble.
Cluster B “disorders” all merge into each other. Histrionics need to be the center of attention but so do narcissists. Histrionics are drama kings or queens. But so are borderlines. Narcissists are low in empathy, dominant charismatic. So are psychopaths.
What is Margo? One can easily label her a narcissist. She is certainly grandiose enough. She also shows histrionic traits. But, in the last analysis, I call her a borderline. Her insecurity about her relationship with Bill reveals a haunting fear of abandonment. She knows her days as a star are numbered and she fears Bill’s interest in her will also fade.
She first attracts notice of her target audience with a silent vigil, standing outside the theater before and after every performance of Aged in Wood, starring Margo Channing. Having gotten their attention, she finally approaches Karen, the playwrite’s wife, a good friend of Margo but someone who isn’t normally noticed outside their small circle. Karen, who laughingly calls herself “the lowest form of celebrity,” eats up the flattery which Eve doles out to her in just the right amount.
to learn she has actually seen every performance of the play. With very few words, Eve turns the strangers in that room into an audience, thereby showing her considerable acting talent. She spins a sad tale of poverty in which the theater and Margo Channing are her only sources of joy, except for a brief marriage to “Eddie,” a soldier who is killed in action. She tells it so well, Margo tears up. Birdie walks in and finds herself butting into a performance. Chastened, she sits down and listens. “What a
story!” exclaims Birdie at the end. “Everything but the bloodhounds snapping at her rear end!” Birdie is the first one to see through her and yet even Birdie is moved by Eve’s story. Note, in the mention of the time she played summer stock, Eve tells them “I was awful.” She makes sure she is not perceived as a possible threat to Margo.
Margo invites Eve to move in with her where she takes on a lot of the tasks Birdie used to perform. She also does more, organizing Margo’s inventory. In time, Margo starts to see through Eve’s mask. Eve’s increasingly aggressive moves toward Bill activates Margo’s insecurity. The growing tension is laid bare at a party for Bill. Margo’s hostility towards Eve doesn’t dim Eve’s ambition. She “casually” mentions to Karen the idea of becoming Margo’s understudy. Somehow nobody tells Margo about it until Margo arrives to “read” with Miss Casswell while she auditions. Margo is hours late for the reading as is her normal habit. But Eve is on time and she “gives a performance” so powerful that it astonishes both Lloyd and Addison. When Margo shows up and finds out that not only is Eve her understudy but she gave a great performance “full of fire and music” for what was only supposed to be a reading, Margo’s paranoia grows to full bloom. She vents her rage in no uncertain terms.
Karen is so stupid that she remains oblivious to Eve’s machinations and decides that her best friend, Margo, has been such a bitch that she needs to be taught a lesson. Karen makes Margo miss a performance of her play, something she ordinarily never does. Meanwhile, Karen has informed Eve of what she was doing so Eve managed to invite a lot of critics to that performance. The reviews are full of praise for Eve’s performance. She is a talented actress. Then Eve gives an interview with Addison in which she disses Margo for playing a part she is too old for and complaining how hard it is for a newcomer to get a break in the business. She has also come on to Bill although Bill rejected her and suggested she “just score it as an incomplete forward pass.”
We Cluster B
who is passed-out drunk, he can be accused of rape. Then there’s statutory rape, meaning any kind of sex with a minor, consensual or not. But does that mean a man who tells the girl he loves her is a rapist if she goes to bed with him because she believed it and it wasn’t true? What if the man changed his mind? Women who cry “rape,” are often accused of just having next morning remorse. A man may think he loves a woman and not feel the same way the next day. I, myself, have wondered what I ever saw in a man who seemed like a great lover the night before. The same Donna Andersen mentioned above spells it out in 
I understand that there are bars especially for young people to meet. These places are known as singles bars. Lying, I am told, is rampant in such places. It’s so common and well enough known to be acknowledged on such TV shows as Sex and the City. In one episode, a character, Miranda, needs a date for the wedding of a friend so she meets a man at a thing where men and women have insta-dates which are really more like interviews. Those who find mutual attraction can go on real dates. Miranda hooks up with a guy who claimed to be a surgeon. He really worked in retail. So, according to this new standard, he was a rapist. The problem with this is that Miranda lied too. When she told the truth, that she was a partner in a law firm, the men lost interest. So she told this “surgeon” that she was a stewardess. Both parties lied. Was it a mutual rape? Or, perhaps, a double rape?
As preposterous as this sounds, a woman named Joyce M. Short wrote a book called 
Fortunately, 
be able to cry rape because the Wall Street millionaire she hooked up with turns out to be a shoe salesman? Isn’t she playing a game too, pretending to be sincere while really trying to marry a fortune? As far as “lying” about feelings goes, feelings change all the time. If a girl is afraid she is being seduced by a guy who isn’t really serious about a relationship, the remedy would be to wait until he’s proven himself over a period of time. In these days of casual sex, people often jump into the sack on very short acquaintance. It’s kind of expected so a woman may fear she will lose the guy if she doesn’t do it. But how serious can the guy be if he loses interest when the girl isn’t immediately available. Thinking one has to do it to keep him interested is tantamount to assuming he isn’t serious about her. At least not yet. Web sites like Love Fraud accuse psychopaths of love bombing their prey as an act of fraud or even rape. As long as we’re being so politically correct, perhaps psychopaths can accuse people like Andersen of scapegoating us with stereotyping. Think about it.
…a psychopath?
The most disturbing charge, that of antisemitism, doesn’t impinge on the question of psychopathy. A psychopath can be a bigot or thoroughly open minded. But I do have a few words to say on his behalf in this area if only to dispose of it. Critics point mostly to an essay he wrote called Judaism in Music which I have read and didn’t really find offensive. The main thesis is that music comes from deep within a culture with its roots in the soil and the language of a people. Since Jews don’t have this kind of background, they can’t exemplify the music of Germany the way someone who does have these roots could do. The essay was largely motivated by Wagner’s resentment of two Jewish composers of his time, 
I’ve been a fan of Wagner since college days. Or, I guess one isn’t supposed to use the word “fan” for someone in the classical tradition. I’m an admirer of Wagner. There. That sounds a lot more dignified. Wagner’s music is in the classical tradition, of course, but it’s really romantic as opposed to classical. Beethoven and Mozart are classical. Anyway, my sister and I would have heated arguments about Wagner’s propensity to get into debt. She was all judgie about it but I didn’t give a rat’s ass whether Wagner paid back his debts. He was a great man and he gave the world far more value than the monetary worth of his debts. Once he said, “They’ll be building statues to my memory but if I try to help myself now…” (quote from memory, not word for word). But here’s a trait that does relate to psychopathy. Psychopaths are said to be irresponsible and have a parasitic lifestyle.
The third charge, that he was a philanderer, is based on the fact that he was married twice and had a famous affair with a beautiful woman named Mathilda Wesendonck. She was married as was his second wife before he took her away from her husband, himself an admirer and friend. Wagner’s behavior was pretty mild by modern standards. Still in all, he was no pillar of conventional family values.
Der Ring des Nibelungen is a series of four separate works that tell the story of the birth and demise of the world. Whole books can (and are) written about the Ring. I’m limiting myself to discussing it in terms of psychopathy. The hero of the Ring is a young upstart named Siegfried. The gods have erred and brought the curse of gold upon the world. Only Siegfried could rid the world of that curse. Wotan deliberately created a race of heroes from which Siegfried could spring forth. However, he was karmically unable to fix things since he had brought the situation about. That reasoning is very un-psychopathic since he took full responsibility for his sins and had real remorse. Now Siegfried, a free spirit with no karmic ties to Wotan, was guiltless and able to act. One of the most emphasized qualities of Siegfried was that he was fearless. He couldn’t even conceive of what fear might feel like. When the wicked Mime tried to teach Siegfried fear, he describes the feelings that he, Mime, experience. But Siegfried thinks it’s a marvelous new experience. He says, “gern begehr ich das Bangen, sehnend verlangt mich der Lust!” (“I would gladly feel this ‘fear.’ I yearn for that pleasure.”) Because of his fearlessness, Siegfried is a great hero. He is light and joyful.
Cunning manipulativeness also come into play in this work. Hagen and Alberich con a family into using Siegfried to fulfill their own ambitions. A Tarnhelm or headpiece has the power to transform the appearance of the wearer into any form desired. Siegfried wears the Tarnhelm and penetrates a wall of fire in order to win for Gunther the hand of Brunnhilde who is really Siegfried’s woman. They have first given Siegfried a potion that makes him forget all about her and fall in love with Gutrune, Gunther’s sister. The Tarnhelm is kind of like a mask behind which the wearer hides his true intentions. Of course, the cunning is seen as an evil thing, not something Wagner would identify with.
In reading And I Don’t Want to Live This Life by Deborah Spungen, Nancy’s mother, I have to wonder if people with histrionic personality disorder can be born that way people are born with psychopathy. There are details in Nancy’s childhood that can suggest narcissism or even psychopathy. She certainly controlled her family and was a holy terror to them for years. There is overlap between all the Cluster B “disorders” but I think a histrionic diagnosis fits her the best.
She needed a series of transfusions to save her life. After the transfusions, it was evident that she was an extremely volatile person, scrappy and feisty.
Courtney Love was born 
commune, spent time in prison and has worked as a stripper (which Nancy did as well). Both were into hard drugs, heroin as were their men.
In their efforts not to “spoil” Nancy, the Spungeons created an aura in which Nancy’s presence dominated more thoroughly than any willful demanding child could never do. They were so afraid of making a sound when Nancy was sleeping, they wouldn’t turn a light switch on or off after they put her to bed. “My friend Janet and her husband lived nearby. They came over to visit one night and sat with us in the darkened living room, afraid to utter a single word or use the bathroom. We tiptoed around in stocking feet. We served them iced tea without ice because we were afraid the noise from cracking ice would awaken her.” They finally resorted to phenobarbital rather than just comfort or feed her when she cried.
all over them. That they would try to reclaim their non-existent dignity by playing stern parents to the already obedient children is ludicrous. As obnoxious as Nancy was in that scene, if her parents were such tools, her behavior was more appropriate than that of Suzy and David. At least Nancy had spunk.
she murdered (probably) instead of being murdered. But she felt a strong connection, a pull towards the persona of Nancy Spungen. She tried to get the role of Nancy in the movie Sid and Nancy. 
Courtney wanted to subvert the archetype. Kurt was a sucker for subversion so it makes sense that he didn’t notice that. Subversion is 
So let’s take a look at who Nancy Spungen was. 1958-1978
Deborah Spungen, the actual author of And I Don’t Want to Live This Life, certainly had a harrowing and dramatic tale to tell. But she told the tale with no acknowledgement of her own mistakes in raising Nancy, the way she let Nancy manipulate her into making Nancy the center of the family while blaming Nancy for everything. When she wasn’t blaming Nancy, she was blaming all the professionals who played a role in dealing with the problems incurred in the raising of her daughter. An example of her self-pity is evident in this quotation.
What she had were track marks all over her little girl’s hands and arms, the track marks I’d seen in the restaurant.
The proud mother held the lovely pink baby in her arms. When I saw it, I nearly screamed. I saw needle marks on that baby’s pudgy little hands. I saw my Nancy’s baby hands covered with track marks. I saw my sweet-smelling, innocent infant with a pink ribbon in her hair, the infant who had grown up to be a receptacle of unendurable pain. Maybe this baby would too. Some would. Too many. I couldn’t blot out that realization, that fear.
are so perfect. “I’ve always found it odd that very young children cry. I think ‘What have you got to cry about? You have no responsibilities. You can play all day. ‘” And he wondered if “even in infancy, a psychopath may be far less prone to crying than others.”
Thinking about it more deeply, I went on saying that I don’t blame babies for crying a lot. After all, finding themselves thrust into this world. They don’t even known where their bodies end and the world begins. They can’t coordinate their arms and legs or even see in the beginning. They suddenly depend on an outside person, the mother, usually. She controls when they eat, when they are warm or cold, when their diapers change, etc. Then they begin crawling and then walking. Everything is really difficult. Fortunately, it’s not in the nature of a baby to be a quitter. They keep trying until they succeed.
M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath, sheds some light on the subject.
Some years ago, I was friends with a group of gals who shared my love of Anne Rice’s vampire novels. We often engaged in moral/intellectual debates about which of the vampires in Rice’s novels were best and who was right or wrong in various story lines. We even named ourselves for the vampire of our choice. Louis was a vampire who felt guilty about killing people. I despised him for that but he was the favorite of the majority of my friends. They self-identified as Louisians. Those who favored Armand called themselves Armandians. I was a Lestatian due to my allegiance Lestat who was the most rational of the vampires. He said things like, “God kills and so we shall kill” and “evil is a point of view.”
While at the funeral of her mother, she met a man whom she did not know. She thought he was amazing, her dream guy, and she fell in love with him but never asked for his number and could not find him after the funeral. A few days later the girl killed her sister. What was her motive in killing her sister?
I got it right away. None of my friends did. One of them asked me why I seemed proud to have the mind of a psychopath. Why, indeed? I realized immediately that none of my friends really understood me and never would. Given our debates, which went on at great length, I was kind of surprised that they would be shocked that I accepted so readily the mantel imposed by my correct answer to the quiz. Maybe I was more like Lestat than they felt comfortable with. (Disclaimer: Lestat is later shown in less flattering lights as Anne Rice, herself, probably developed. But that’s besides the point.)
My blog just got a new follower. I visited the blog of this person and was surprised to see the lead title: 
that “empaths are humble and sincere.” She goes on that “Psychopaths are overconfident and narrow-minded; empaths are confident but open-minded.” If psychopaths are overconfident and empaths merely confident, what are those people who suffer from a lack of confidence? Moving right along, “Psychopaths are selfish and violent; empaths are selfless and loving. Psychopaths are rigid, inflexible, and intolerant; empaths are open, flexible, and tolerant.” Well. Empaths are all kind of wonderful, aren’t they? Selfless and loving. Open, flexible and tolerant. We, on the other hand, are selfish, violent, rigid, inflexible and intolerant.
Such black and white thinking is what is called splitting and it is usually associated with people with Borderline Personality Disorder. It looks to me that such absolute division of people into pure goodness and pure badness is not consistent with the quality of being “deeply thoughtful” or “open-minded.”
Ah, but Universe Theyself realizes how false black and white thinking really is and admits: “But human nature is never so black and white.” Yet, she still assigns the narrow-minded, selfish and violent traits to that part of human nature which she labels psychopathic. We each have traits of both the psychopath and the empath within. Yet 1% of the population consists of actual psychopaths. She got this figure from the same deeply insightful website that tells us “How to Spot Psychopaths.” She also mentions that the book The Mask of Insanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley said psychopaths number greater than 4%. That book’s title is The Mask of Sanity. A third reference is Dutton’s The Wisdom of Psychopaths but only through a review in The Guardian. Too bad she apparently hasn’t read Dutton’s book because she might find out we are more than just narrow-minded, “rigid, inflexible, and intolerant” folk, traits that are incompatible with wisdom.
She continues her analysis by connecting psychopathy with the “lizard brain” which gives us a tendency to cling to tradition and habit. She seems to equate psychopathy with conservatism and admonishes us to be “able to cut through the bullshit divisiveness of religions and narrow it to a single concept that we can all agree on: love, especially love for our children.” While she is insisting that psychopaths are a bunch of stodgy, conservative advocates of religious tradition, she might be surprised to know that many psychopaths don’t follow any religion. Our “lizard brains” are not propelled by fear. In fact, fearlessness is one of the traits of psychopathy. Fear can, of course, make people unwilling to let go of “tried and true” dogmas of society. But it is 
Psychopaths are less attached to a static self. We are also, for the most part, less burdened with the baggage of conventional thought. I have been a critic of conventional thought all my life. Rationality is one of the known characteristics of psychopathy. The irrationality of our society drives me wild. For example, in an episode of Law & Order: SVU, a woman was desperately trying to earn a living with which to support herself, her husband and her terminally ill child by working in the porn industry. One day, unable to find a baby sitter, her husband in the hospital, she brings the child to work, where they kept her in a place where she wouldn’t be exposed to dreaded porn. Unfortunately, the kid broke free from the adults looking after her just when the cops where there so these cops and their charming ADA arrested the woman for child endangerment. They went on to endanger the child, themselves by separating her from her mother, one of the few people who knew how to administer medical care to her daughter. If is considered worse for a child to witness pornography than for a child to suffocate without the adults who know how to keep her breathing. These kinds of irrational thinking are just accepted by most people without even questioning them.
Psychopaths have some of the worst press in the world. We, the publicly acknowledged psychopaths, have been working on rehabilitating our image with limited success. We are also glamorized and, in a crazy way, I think it is our very glamorization that makes people reluctant to see us as we are
Charismatic people do have magic. Some of that magic has to do with daring to step outside of society’s rules. There have always been mythical figures from Till Eulenspiegel to the Pied Piper who beckoned those laden with the norms and responsibilities most people dare not shuck off. The notorious Led Zeppelin reference the Piper in their notorious song, Stairway to Heaven:
Wikipedia says “Till Eulenspiegel is a trickster figure originating in Middle Low German folklore. He appeared in chapbooks telling episodes that outlined his picaresque career in Germany, the Low Countries, Denmark, Bohemia, Poland, and Italy.”
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Society has a strong bugaboo against acting in one’s own self-interest. The highest compliment NTs hand out is to call someone “selfless.” I remember Harry Potter was so-described. Let’s look at selflessness for a moment. Harry Potter was protected from Lord Voldemort, who wanted to destroy him, by his mother’s selfless sacrifice of her own life on his behalf. But, the moment he would become an adult, his protection would vanish. So his friends arranged a risky means of moving him to a safer place at that moment. Lives were lost during this transfer but it succeeded. So what did “selfless” Harry do the moment he was safe? He prepared to leave this place of safety because he didn’t want to impose danger on his friends by being there. HELLO! His friends had already lost lives and sacrificed much. So idiot-Harry wants it all to have been for naught? He could have wandered off into the world without protection and spared them the peril if he was so damned selfless. Ever hear the phrase “too good to live?”
While selflessness is reified, “selfishness,” it’s opposite, is shamed. Nobody wants to admit s/he considers hir own self-interest first. Nobody but a psychopath, that is. 
CLUSTER B 