The role of pyschopathy in modern society.
POSTED BY: Fremdfirma
UPDATED: Monday, September 29, 2025 19:26
VIEWED: 9758
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Hello,
That last statement reminds me of a quote I heard somewhere, but cannot attribute:
"You are what you pretend to be."
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Quote:
"You are what you pretend to be."
Vonnegut.
Mike
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Goes right back to one of my favorite things to say...
"I don't care what you BELIEVE, I care what you DO."
Usually followed by the less common, but still heartfelt...
"What you do, is who you are."
It is by a persons conduct that we determine the truth of them, not intent, not belief, or what they say - in the end, it's what they DO, that matters.
That's kinda how I wound up with the UU, but that tale for another time.
-F
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It's been a while since I've been here, but it wasn't for lack of interest.
My idea lies somewhere between "man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal" (Heinlein) and "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be" (Vonnegut).
There are limits to thought. Roughly 90% of what goes on inside us isn't accessible by thought. And no matter how much we pretend, we'll never sprout wings and fly. On the other hand, what we tell ourselves the world is and who we are - our paradigms - determines whether we'll rip the still-beating hearts out of captives to sacrifice to the gods, or be able to entrust our children to strangers on the sidewalk while we shop in the store.
What I hope I was doing was bringing up the problem with paradigms.
And here is where I'm going with that - paradigms are like species. They originate from pervasive and therefore imperceptible environmental characteristics - the drift of continents, the invention of agriculture; from very immediate and trivial influences - the color of a feather, the presence of a particular leader; and anything in between.
But once formed, we humans imbue our paradigms with permanence: humans do these things we do because of reincarnation, or the gods, or god, or because it's human nature, or that's the way the world works. Always has been, always will be, forever and ever, amen.
And we live by them, support them, teach our children them, kill and die to defend them - clueless to the fact that they are near-random in their origins, and that pretty much anything in the full range of human behavior is equally possible. We are like horses with blinkers on - useful, tractable and not free.
Anyway, I'll need to get back to this later.
***************************************************************
Silence is consent.
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Hello,
That's kind of beautiful, the way you eloquently stated your case there.
It actually reminds me of Dianetics. Please don't become angry or offended by the referene. I had the pleasure of reading a very old copy of Dianetics before I learned it was the Bible to a wacky religion. Some of the details of Dianetics are poppycock, but there's an underlying philosophy that's right on.
In the book Dianetics, the concept exists that we humans are like robots, fulfilling programming that we're not even aware of. The idea is that throughout our lives and perhaps especially in the early years, we are exposed to experiences that shape us. Not all of these experiences are positive, and most of their effects are subconscious. We are often not even aware of the plethora of programming that drives us, and so we find ourselves helpless to direct the course of our lives.
The basic premise of Dianetics, and here I strip away the weird details and psychological missteps, is that we need to figure out what is driving us, acknowledge it, and discard it if it isn't helpful. The Dianetic ideal is to be a person of reason, 'clear' from all the subconscious drivers and programs directing our behavior, so that we can choose, free for the first time, what it is exactly that we wish to do.
It's too bad Dianetics didn't stick to that basic idea, instead descending into pseudo-hypnosis and wacky theories and apparently eventually devolving into a religion about Mr. X from Planet Y and the Alien people Z and using a tricorder to read your hoopla, etc.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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Same basic premise as me banging the "question all that you perceive" drum alla time.
My niece is especially helpful in this, as children don't have a lotta preconceptions that adults do, and is quite fond of the phrase...
"That doesn't make any sense!"
Outta the mouths of babes, I tellya.
-F
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
...It's a blessing and a curse. It allows us to build on abstract/ useful concepts like "electrons", but also on abstract/ dysfunctional concepts like "corporations".
After all, if 99% are getting screwed over (and I believe we are) then why are the 1% still in power?
The 1% are still in power because they have the 'money' (GOLD) , the Guns , and the Gorramned Lawyers...
Heck , a LOT of 'em ARE Lawyers !
BTW , Frem , I still want to ask...Just WHAT IS 'Piss-Shop-athy' , anyway ?
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Hi SignyM
In your one post are you referring to the study of human children and chimps (?) where the chimps quickly figured out which actions were bogus while the children kept doing the same things over by rote, even when they could see that certain actions were pointless ?
Also, I think that science has an essential difference from other paradigms. It requires that you test and check your ideas against reality in different ways. In that way it differs from belief.
And still, despite that, the person who sees what everyone else sees but in a new way is the one who makes the breakthroughs - Newton and gravity (though he didn't discover what gravity is, he mathematically described the motion of two objects toward each other - the apple to the earth, and the infinitesimal motion of the earth to the apple); and Darwin and natural selection magnifying small differences into distinct species.
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Silence is consent.
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To continue on forward ----
I think that it's pretty obvious to everyone at this point that I find the unexamined paradigm to be the major human failing.
As I mentioned in another thread, the overwhelming human history has been one of societal extinction - of families, groups, tribes, villages, cultures and civilizations. Over all the millennia of humanity nothing is left but the most recent versions. Societies however large or small may go on for 100 years, or 500, or 1000, but they then fail, usually leaving nothing behind, occasionally empty skeletons and, very rarely, rubble or buildings. But of their culture, there is no remnant in current society. And so we don't honor Isis, or Hunab Ku. Their ideas died with them.
In his book 'Collapse' Jared Diamond examines the factors contributing to societies that collapsed - and compares them to societies that didn't. But the distinguishing feature of the successful societies is that instead of marching to their cultural drummer right over the cliff, they followed their paradigms up to the edge ....... and stepped back. They realized that they couldn’t go on in the same way indefinitely. They had to reexamine core values and assumptions, and change them in order to survive. And they did.
Now, in Diamond's book the failed paradigms weren't necessarily sociopathic, sometimes they were just mal-adapted (real Greenlanders keep dairy cows and don't eat fish !). But in the US I see a lot of pernicious paradigms fueling our culture and economy, that one way or another aren't sustainable and will lead us over the metaphorical cliff, if we chose to follow them.
I've been working on a list, but it's not complete, and it's late, so it will have to wait for later.
But I really hope other people chime in on this whole topic. 
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Silence is consent.
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Hello,
I'm not sure I can agree with the idea of societies dying without a trace.
When a society dies from anything other than an all-sweeping instantaneous disaster, the people from that society move on and create a new society.
That new society, being made by people from the last society, carries on and evolves the culture of the last society. They no doubt adapt beliefs and practices to their new environs and situation, but I doubt they forget everything they ever knew or believed when they are starting over.
--Anthony
"Liberty must not be purchased at the cost of Humanity." --Captain Robert Henner
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