Idealizing the Sociopath

As developmental psychology and developmental neurobiology chug forward, it is becoming increasingly plausible that there is no such thing as someone who is "born a sociopath".

A simple, yet easy thought-experiment to consider in relation to this claim is the pervasiveness of symmetry dynamics in the organization of the matter of the world around us. Are you - the human being reading this - not an expression of this phenomena? Are you - do you imagine - a 'centrifugal' dynamic, as opposed to a 'centripetal' dynamic?

To believe the myth of an 'inborne' sociopathy is to believe that some types of matter - sociopaths - don't pursue the path of least resistance, and that is too great and too fantastical a claim to take at face value. What more plausible - and simple - Occhamz Razor informed - explanation should replace this?

Ritual Abuse

Humans are more than clever enough to reason the existence of symmetry as a dynamical force of nature. Indeed, Empedocles reasons in just such a way when he associates love with 'centripetal' forces and hatred with 'centrifugal' forces. But it is a profound and utter delusion - a yet a disturbingly common and universal one among the human species - to fall in love with your own idealized self-image, and succumb, despite all logic, to the monstrous fallacy that you are somehow "above good and evil".

Fundamentally, trauma means "overwhelmingly ones resources". So that, if you know about something, and feel the capacity to tolerate something others would find intolerable - i.e. killing - than you may think yourself to be above trauma. Again - a fallacy - a fallacy borne from an ignorance of how your brain has been structured, and the fact that your awareness of being is in itself one big structured dynamic encoded within the microgenetic dynamics of your brain.

So where then is the sociopath made, since many psychologists succumb to the mythos that sociopaths are "born" - giving them exactly the sort of idealized self-representation that makes them feel so tough and invulnerable.

“For the development of possible sociopathic personality disorder (and predisposition to violence and aggressive behavior toward others, with egosyntonic aggressiveness) the traumatic condition must have been experienced very early, beginning possibly in utero, in the prenatal period, especially in the last trimester when the HPA axis and central amygdala are in a critical period of maturation.” – Clara Mucci, Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Therapy for Personality Disoders; pg. 36; Norton, 2018

Very early indeed implies a ritual type abuse that begins at the moment of conception. We're talking about - in today's parlance - attempting to control a woman's natural inclination to form an attachment with her fetus, and via such prevention of attachment formation, creating within the core of that child's developing nervous system a profound tendency to resist or withdraw from feelings of connectedness with the Other.

Indeed, the brain of a child who is developing in this way will not form a normal amygdala or a cingulate cortex. The brain of a sociopath is bound to look different - not because they are "genetically" different - but because the ontogenetic process of development is being heavily biased and undermined by a vicious, hateful, and sadomasochistic fantasy that the self is "beyond good and evil". Such a formation - a spirit, to be sure - is a very, very old one. So old that it requires a tome of a some size to make sense of how human beings could have become this way.

What is most astonishing about the phenomena of sociopathy - the "4%" of those amongst us - is how poorly understood the whole of the phenomena is by academic psychology. Genetic has since given way to epigenetics, and the notion of a human being that manifests a "phenotype" - or form of being - that isn't informed by interaction is slowly being understood as a pipedream, a delusion that has constantly evaded our attention despite its nonstop occurrence in the structuring and functioning of our minds and our relationships with one another.

The love of power lies at the root of this psycho and social pathology. But what really stimulaes the formation of this condition is a type of being "overwhelmed" taht is comparable to the feelings of being overwhelmed experienced by a person with social traumas, who, when feeling positive emotions (a phenomena fundamentally dependent on social dynamics) feel themselves overwhelmed by the presence of the power ating upon them: that is, the power of the other - the other faces without, and the Other, the source of the traumas, embodied within their own awareness within - the internalization of the 'aggressor' which has since become the persecutor of the self.

That the source of positive feeling of self could be fundamentally social, and yet the human self could be driven into a sadomasochistic nihilism that denies any such dependency on others, is a bizarre, and insane situation to find ourselves in. By definition, the sociopath has a malformed brain which does not easily - or effectively - represent the embodied feeling needs of the Other. Why this is is quite intelligible; but that it is so resistant to being "reprogrammed" is largely a function of the power of the expectancy within their genetic-epigenetic control system of "how the world is" - and therefore, if humans are crazy, sadistic, and evil, and this "world" - the physical, and material - is where we live, then the material world is evil, and my being in this world in this way is thus a confirmation of that evil: I am evil because I am supposed to be evil.

This rationale emanates from the social-spirit which controls the symmetry dynamics of self and other, and although it is a "truth" of the events which summate up towards this sort of (asinine) philosophy, once a different perspective, a more encompassing perspective, is introduced, the brain dynamics of the perceiver/cognizer will reflexively represent their own coherency as a dud - and hence, will produce a defensive reaction against that higher level coherency - that higher symmetry, which reveals the harsh, unvarnished truth.

Change

Change is what has been happening over the last few thousand years of humankind, with the "Axial age", Buddhism, Judaism, The Pre-Socratic philosophers, and later on the ecumenism of Christianity, has been leading to a more and more coherent representation of the human self vis-a-vis the manias of shamanic belief systems which lie at the very root of state and official institutional controls on religion, the economy, and the military.

With the emergence of science, the mythological consciousness took an even greater blow, as the theoretical imagination - the part of us that inquires to understand things in contingent ways, with ever greater subtlety and nuance, marches forward, mythological consciousness and the idealization of self that it is based upon will gave way to the power of theoretical consciousness, and to the truths that it lays bear before our eyes.

Shame. There is no more powerful truth of what we are than that we are creatures which suffer shame when we are related to asymmetrically, and when we relate to others asymmetrically. The cognitive manifestation of shame is often referred to as 'guilt' - but the core it radiates out from is purely a function of the symmetry dynamics of our interacting bo

bodies… Our brain 'structures out' of our awareness the facts of what control us, so long as we can maintain the fiction of our 'rightness' by putting before our awareness Other's who confirm our specious truths.

But the real truth remains as a virtual background, just as electrons and photons remain as a virtual background which helps guide every electron down its path of least resistance, so too does everything you do bear a dynamical trace to a mother, a father, and a set of circumstances in material and social culture which made you what you are.

We seek to hide; we run behind our masks and imagine that they possess real ontological power; but they don't. They will fall apart, and all that will be left will be our witnessing consciousness, left to bear witness to the traces of the effects we left upon the world.

a reply to: Astrocyte

More like idolizing

a reply to: [post=2407986
Ok. Its obvious you have put time into this perspective. Almost feels like lawyer speak in a way, assuming you know the stance of the reader and then laying down traps along the way that will influence them, even surprise them with insight thus helping to influence and even shock into submission of your perspective. As you put it "show them the error of their faulty thinking. Their less than and poorly thought out coherence." Bit flashy but i get it.

I commend you on the effort at least. However their are serious issues with your linear thinking. Assuming something to be true and then proceeding forward, such as defining this notion of being above or beyond good and evil.

Many serial killers and the like have often been reported to use this phrase "beyond good and evil." It is vague in a way, but in truth only acts as a usage of wordplay, a sorta wordlike analogy. A bird that has been raised in a cage all its life will never be able to explain what its like outside the cage. But because of the heafty desire for answers, from the other as you put, they simply just say they went to a place beyond good and evil. Because they know on the onset of that pressure they cannot communicate it. "How do i explain something that cannot be explained in words, its something you have to experience."

Whats interesting is why do so many killers and "sociopaths" use this phrase? Why is it that they all come to the same conclusion? How does this "beyond good and evil" expression expand back through time, all across the world, and throughout cultures?

I could go on and on but this explanation and everything else you have said could take hours. I dont even want to write this but the laughs i had from reading gave me just enough gumption to retort.

Perhaps your beyond good and evil is nothing more than the realization, upon the individual, that everything that constitutes good and evil is nothing more than habit based on conditioning and repeated programming. Imagine how you would view the world if all of a sudden your life long coditioning and programming went away. Like a mind memory wipe of all notions of good and evil. Or perhaps lets say you were raised in a cult. You were taught that...lets say sex in all forms were bad. One day you screw up and get seducted by some vixin well trained in the arts. You have sex. In that moment, the sensations you felt were beyond your previous understandings of good and evil, in that moment you see them as childlike, "how alarmingly black and white they are." You realize you were lied too all your life. "Why would they hide this from me!?!?"

It is the onset of this beyond the cage moment that starts everything off and then expands from their, "what else did they lie about, what other unknown program's are lurking about beyond my conscious awareness?" A rediscovery, a relearning process takes place. Which in terms of violence, is likely why they get more and more out of control, and more bizare they further they go - at least from a looking in from an outside perspective goes.

Of course this isnt getting into cultural bs. Your high coherence system uses sociopaths to protect you, like navtly seals and such.

Anyways, your bs was entertaining so thank you.

a reply to: Jimface369

Many serial killers and the like have often been reported to use this phrase "beyond good and evil." It is vague in a way, but in truth only acts as a usage of wordplay, a sorta wordlike analogy. A bird that has been raised in a cage all its life will never be able to explain what its like outside the cage. But because of the heafty desire for answers, from the other as you put, they simply just say they went to a place beyond good and evil. Because they know on the onset of that pressure they cannot communicate it. "How do i explain something that cannot be explained in words, its something you have to experience."

So I'm not sure how you've gone from describing how serial killers think, and how the phrase "beyond good and evil" is mere wordplay - an attempt to make a point that "transcends their ability to make it.".

Do you know what this sounds like to me? Like you agree with the notion, and are more or less attempting to peddle the postmodern foil that "language can't contain truth". Who says? If this is an issue of power - and politics - meaning you can murder me and anyone who says differently, meaning you will come away the victor, meaning your claim that "truth is mere wordplay" - even as you use such wordplay - then I can understand the motivation to rip apart language with language for the sake of preserving your reality.

The issue is more deeper: why do you suppose other people can't read a motivation in your attempt to deconsturct processual meaning? Everyone who is sane understands that time creates us; we are created by events in the world - by interactions between ourselves and Others - and it the consequences of these interactions which frames our meaning.

Language is what we use to orient our attention to cognitive objects. The entire semiotic world we build to regulate our affective bodies is VIA LANGUAGE. Language is thus everything; it is real, and it is playing a very important part in helping every human who uses it to regulate their experience of reality. We cope through narratives, but the narratives we use and the logic we exercise expresses the nature of the history we have.

Traumatized people use a deformed logic. It is a logic which deemphasizes processes, language, events, and time, and hyper-emphasizes all the reverse notion: objects, super-ordinate truths, singularities, and the now.

Why would such a person seek to deform his semiotic representation of reality this way, if not to avoid the semiotic consequences of allowing himself to think in relational, dyadic ways - ways which take into account bidrectional influences, where the body is imprinted by the other, and where my observing self is forced to form according to what the body - and the other - put into it.

Imagine how you would view the world if all of a sudden your life long coditioning and programming went away.

And that, my friend, is not how the world works. You have a brain - a brain that has formed your personality from conception. You were not always as you are today; you were a fetus once, and then you were born, you were babbling, not knowing anything but the affective realities of the others around you. Its that world - Their Worlds - which penetrated into yours and made your world what it is.

There is, in other words, no world independent of the world between your ears. You seem to think that because traumatized minds can converge on the same dissociative "blissfulness" that the blissfulness is in fact a pre-existing reality. It is emergent; it is there to serve your needs to regulate yourself. Your experience of this 'eternity' is predicated on the trauma's which formed the motivational needs to escape your embodiment.

Most people don't experience embodiment as torture: only traumatized people do.

There is no cage; the cage is a construction of your history - of your suffering, which remains embodied, which remains poorly constructed, and thus, creating a mind which can't control its feelings.

All of this is what sound thinking produces. If its "bs", you merely reveal your need to posit a totally different way of thinking, believing you can outsmart the healthy people by using words to "outwit" them. This is what postmodernism and all the other craziness from the left is about. They think that by speaking in strictly clichés, that the force of repetition by them and others will drag in the rest.

I believe humans are stupid enough to fall for that; but, on the longshot, it is likely that the more coherent representations of reality will win out - or at least, it is the least a decent human being can hope for: that delusion and dissociation and denial of suffering and the way the past has shaped us will not win.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Hot damn, i tip my hat to you. You are defiently talented in juking, dancing around the subject, misaligning previous statements, adding in
rebuttal attacks based on things i have not previously discussed nor subtly mentioned with "cliches" or attempted to muddy the waters with wordplay to elicit meta magical imbueings that draw upon the imagination to fill in the blanks with "whatever" postmodern fallacy. Might i add using wordplay to refute wordplay, as my statements were obviously and strategically used to trick the "healthy" folks! The only thing that is clear at this point is that you would be fun to argue with over some beers.

At what point did i say we are not a result of our past? Have unknown discussions taken place that i am unware of?

My original statement or purpose of posting was merely passing curiosity based on some laughs. I had no idea i had signed a contract to discuss each little verbage and already feel like i have made a mistake in trying to shed some light on a complex issue, or as you put it protect my reality.

Though the overall message looks like nothing more than arguing for arguments sake. For example, my passage of "the sensations they felt were beyond their previous understandings of good and evil" applies not as some attempt at postmodern rhetoric but as a basic foundation for human behavior. Get ready, here we go again with my cliches and wordplay...a man believes firmly that abortion is wrong, no matter what. Yet his arm chair quaterback way of theorizing at a safe distance takes a tremendous nut punt when his daughter is raped and thus becomes pregnant. No longer does his previous ideas of good and evil match. Which if you look close enough confirms that we are who we are in the present as a direct result of the past.

You would be very fun to argue with but that would require much more effort than i am willing to take on, unless you can thrill me with more vernacular tounge twisting.

a reply to: Jimface369

My original statement or purpose of posting was merely passing curiosity based on some laughs.

That strikes you as reasonable? The entire spiel of your last post was all about "passing curiosity based on some laughs"?

Is it really surprising to you that I would respond this way - in confusion, or needing to speculate as to your intentions, since apparently your chosen way of being is "trickster"-like? No intention at all to address the issue seriously by sharing your real - and not constructed - beliefs?

Your problem is that your passive, implicit self, is utterly dissociated from your cognizing, agentic self. You are literally bound and wound up in rationalizations that make absolutely no sense - at all.

Every word you write seems to be motivated explicitly for the effect of pride. You want to experience yourself in a way that makes you feel powerful - and yet ignore the actual dyadic context: discussion with another human, and act like your dishonest, zero-faith approach to speaking clearly and truly isn't a demented problem.

It is. Life doesnt have to move that way, and in non-pathological cases, in fact doesn't.

Forgive me for confusing you for a person who was aware of himself, and lived responsibly towards that awareness.

Instead, you seem to think you're an alien, beyond conditions - even though you sort of underhandedly are being organized by affective-attractors dictated by me (the words/intentions I write) which you most likely take to be existent beings with something to offer - and not merely emergent properties of the whole 'gestalt' which controls your biodynamical functioning.

Which if you look close enough confirms that we are who we are in the present as a direct result of the past.

And why should this create an irresolvable conflict? Yes, the past determines the present; yet the present is always existing in relation to the possible - the future.

“I am led to a new triad: Actuals, Possibles, and Mind. Mind measures Possibles to yield, acausally, new in the universe Actuals, which acausally yield new Possibles for Mind to measure to again yield new Actuals yielding new Possibles for Mind to measure to again yield new Actuals yielding new Possibles for Mind, with free-will, to measure.” – Stuart Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe; pg. 8; Oxford, 2016

This is Stuart Kauffman's Peircean informed metaphysics, where the mind is the interface between the actual (the brain) and the future, which he terms the 'adjacent possible'. How that adjacent possible unfolds is entirely a function of what exists in the past probabilistically, and how the mind "chooses" between the various probabilities that exist.

So is free-will real? This is what you seem to be nitpicking at. If you understand probability, and the openness of the mind to observing and regulating its own contents, it should not be surprising that the answer is a qualified "yes". Yes. You can suppress what is motivationally probable to being expressed, by invoking another self-state, or motivational state, which, if it takes into account a more fuller understanding of reality, will derive an added coherency, and hence, power, and so become able to regulate the content that was probabilistically most likely to be selected for action.

I see no problems with this scheme, and it more or less reflects the phenomenology of the mind. The body sets the conditions - by motivating - and then the world probabilistically acts to naturally select an interpretation. We are at the cusp - a liminal zone between actual and potential, and we can choose rightly, or wrongly - with its socioaffective consequences.

You have a very fun persona, Jim. But it is extreme: as in, too much, too playful, too disengaged - not serious enough.

Existentially, your committed to a position that seems to be a function of trauma. Without the trauma, the narrative, philosophy, and value system, wouldn't exist. With the trauma, it seems or appears to you as if nothing else could be real or valuable but what your experience suggests.

I don't see how you think you can wiggle out of the threat-safety dynamics of your brain - or how you can fail to register that the universe knows better than you, is bigger than you, and more coherent than you.

We can't defy or violate its rules without putting ourselves into a geometrodynamical dilemma: we are forming meaning from a substandard level of feeling - a function of the effects of acting in ways that has promoted social division and the emergence of a culture that generates delusional egos.

There is no law of nature that says humans have to live this way. It is fear - and the trust in the power of your own self to "outwit the universe" which compels the "ends justify the means" behavior.

a reply to: Astrocyte

Its rather amazing to watch someone feed on their own self, to slurp up their own vomit and consider it actual nourishment, while also rejecting any and all other interpretations by simply calling them faulty, subjective misjudgements rooted in trauma. Then again, this whole pot calling the kettle black, these "trickster" epitomes filled with colorful language fall short when most of your message is filled with long winded bs that results in nothing more than strenuous preaching sessions. Which makes me wonder if your trying to impress me with your verbage, some way of convincing me to crumple and trash my previous understanding on the topic or if your just flexing your lexicon while surprisingly lacking substance in all that flailing.

So in short, we are mirroring each other and arguing for arguments sake. Though your application is more...a little too serious.

Words themselvs may have basic root meaning for all, but you arecleaving out how everyone relates these "words" differently. Love for example can mean completely different things to different folks, which brings up your trauma based reality of the sociopath equating love with abuse and trauma. So in fact you are contradicting yourself by saying that on one hand words have definate meaning and can only be processed coherently by the healthy, but then retracting that by implicating sociopaths process reality through trauma. Indicating only sociopaths do this instead of all people doing this.

The way you structute reality seems heavily rooted in some kind of elitist mindset, implicating that you have never been through trauma thus leaving your cohetent intellect untouched and intact. Yet how are we defining trauma? What us tramatic for one could never register for another, does this make them a sociopath? If your mind has been untouched and still operating within the realms of logical coherence you therefore are quilty of the very thing you accuse the sociopath of being quilty of, beyond trauma - tough and resilent, above it.

It takes a unique form of detachment to not be able to see this projection. Very schizoid like in its over emphisis in literal interpretation.

It is great to see a discussion going on.... Astrocyte doesn't usually reply and discuss in topics he/she posts.
I find Astrocyte posts nearly impossible to read but having someone smart in the dialogue really helps.....

a reply to: dfnj2015

Either you didn't understand the OP, or you're being willfully obtuse for any number of possible reasons, such as:

a) You are following a crafted agenda, yours or another's, formally or informally, and in reality you have emotions very different from those you portray in your public persona. = Wolf.
b) You are embarassed at your lack of understanding & felt the need to hit back at the intellectual mind which constructed the OP. = Juvenile.
c) You are fearful of what the OP was suggesting, and subconsciously you sought to exalt your position by being obtuse, following the false logic that attack is the best form of defence against the near-mythological & potentially lethal force we understand as ignorance. Archetypal ignorance represents an insidious risk to self in terms of failure to understand novel issue = failure to survive if novel issue should eventually prove to be threatening. = Natural Born Coward.

Just thought I'd throw some speculations around, seeing as we're dealing with a multifaceted & subtle subject.