The Psychopath - The Mask of Sanity | Hacker News Reader

The Psychopath - The Mask of Sanity

cassiopaea.com

11 pointscj14 comments

I was agreeing with the essay until I got to about the 75% mark, and it went off-tangent about how religion helps enable psychopathology, despite explicitly avoiding the topic for most of the paper. (I should have taken the mention of "Indigo children" as a warning sign, despite the paper treating that as more of a kind of fashion rather than a religious concept.)

It turns out that this page appears to be SEO content bait for a constellation of crack-pot sites dating from 2005, most notably "Signs of the Times" and 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/site_map_qfg.htm

Actually it looks like they have actual stolen content such as a stolen pdf book and the given article is basically cut and pasted from somewhere else. The rest is just self promotion of something completely different such as a conspiracy theory. Its really interesting that this actually got this far.

From the website (The actual thing being promoted)

QUANTUM FUTURE

This name came to my mind in Florence on a sunny Saturday of June 9, 1990, while walking along Viale Niccolo Machiavelli up to Piazza Michelangelo. Together with the name, Quantum Future, there came a feeling of weight and of urgency. I decided that I should not waste my time any more doing what others consider important. I felt that certain ideas that were waiting some place in my mind for so many years must not be postponed. That there is nothing more important than them. And so I decided to venture a new project. I knew from the very beginning that such an excursion into unknown territories is better undertaken in a company rather than alone. And I remembered discussions that I had with Philippe Blanchard a few years ago in Bielefeld. I wrote to him, and my proposal was met with a most friendly response. The project has started.

It is about Quantum and about Future. It is about Potential and about Actual.It is about Space and about Time. I want it to be also about Knowledge and about Mind, about Determinism and about Free Will. And about knowing and understanding of ourselves together with the outside world. I have chosen the picture by Rene Magritte to symbolize the project. There is an ocean, and over the ocean and under the sky, there is floating a granite rock that carries a castle on its top. The rock seems weightless. Or better: it is heavy, but gravity does not apply. I wish that one day the project will bring us closer to an understanding of our hidden powers that can make rocks float in mid-air.

Why is it off tangent? It makes sense to me that systems like religion or government are easily subverted. I also read the "Indigo Children" part as being critical of the concept, ie. pandering to psychopaths.

Not that they're not crackpots - the conclusion of the article is pretty wacky - but your criticism is a little off.

I know this is a late response, but...

My concern is that the article felt like that for cases of institutional corruption, the article reasoned, "A, therefore C" instead of saying "A implies B, B implies C, therefore A implies C." The article didn't adequately give the reader reasoning or context for an anti-institutional slam out of the blue like that. (For religion, a few paragraphs discussing historical examples like the Inquisition or pedophile priests would have both strengthened the argument and smoothed out the narrative.)

An even later response :)

That section comes right on the tail of discussing how pscyhopathy seems to be an inherited trait, and that there seems to be a lot of evidence, at least anecdotally, for children who have much of the same behaviours as psychopaths. So it doesn't seem that out of place to me.

The anti-institutional 'slam' was just them pointing out that a lot of the religious doctrines seem to follow a psychopathic 'rationale', ie. here is the truth, now don't question it. My reading was that it was almost an epidemiological study on psychopaths subverting social organisations (since that's how they seem to work individually).

Of course, the article is mostly anecdotal evidence, so it's hard to tell how seriously to take this, but it's certainly food for thought.

I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There are a couple of problems with labels:

1. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick way of getting an approximate picture of a person. If somebody introduces you to Rick as "a former Republican senator from South Dakota" your mind is already filling in lots of blanks about Rick with categories like "male", "senator", "Republican" and "South Dakotan". Our mind gives us a head-start in knowing about Rick. The problem comes when we don't allow ourselves to revise this rough-draft picture of Rick. Perhaps we think all Republicans are like X, so Rick is like X. Therefore, we don't bother looking for information about whether Rick is like X, because we already know. Labels can get in the way of actually knowing somebody.

2. A label often carries the implicit assumption that the aspects of the person in question are immutable. In other words, people don't change. It's different to say someone is a "psychopath" instead of "going through a psychopathic phase".

"In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different type of human."

This quote really bothered me. This completely dehumanizes "psychopaths." They are officially "the other". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other

Sheesh, this is simplistic. The world is a complex place, and there are niches for all sorts of personality types. People can be cold-blooded about killing but care about their family (Tony Soprano?)

A good show about all this is "Damages". Mad Men gets it too -- simple morality narratives, where everyone is binary good/evil, do not reflect the richness of human character.

"Cheating skills seem to have an adaptive value in our society. The fact is: psychopaths often end up on the top of the heap, John Forbes Nash, for example." John Nash is schizophrenic, not psycopath.

You know what another word for psychopath is? Asshole. It's easy to spot them and it's easy to avoid them so calm down. It's not a full blown epidemic and these people have been around since the beginning of time.

Not always, or at least they're not so obvious, some pretend to be your friend and to console you all the while they are the ones causing you harm.

A better word may be "manager".

You sound bitter. Are you speaking from experience?

My point was that this article takes a long and winding road to reach the simple conclusion that some people are simply assholes and there is nothing to be done about it because they are built differently and the article makes it all sound really menacing. There is nothing menacing here. Most assholes have the same profile so it's really easy to figure them out after you've come into contact with a few of them. Turning it into a research program is in my opinion a waste of money which is the other thing the article seems to advocate.

The authors argue that people in general (unlike you) are not good at spotting psychopaths, that psychopathy is an increasingly successful evolutionary strategy, that psychos are controlling society to help nurture their psycho offspring, whom certain in-denial hippies have dubbed 'indigo children'.

I thought the whole thing was immensely entertaining (but I'm just saying that to stave off the terror).

It's easy to spot the ones you've spotted. The ones you didn't spot, on the other hand, are clearly better at hiding themselves.

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