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Bernie Madoff, probable sociopath, following in the footsteps of Charles Ponzi, definite sociopath

December 16, 2008 by pathwhisperer

Ah, the fruits of an economy that gives corporations sociopathic freedoms. The economy is such a perfect match to sociopathic skills that it is hard to believe it wasn’t designed by sociopaths.  If a corporate liars culture is allowed to develop, sociopaths will take it to the limit and beyond. Sociopaths are incapable of self regulation, they need adult supervision (literally, due to their existing in an arrested development state — morally,  judgementwise, personality, sexually, etc.).

Bernard Madoff

Bernard Madoff

Charles Ponzi

Charles Ponzi

Quoting Mike Lupica’s NY Daily News column, Unbridled greed chips away at last remnants of the American Dream, http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/14/2008-12-14_unbridled_greed_chips_away_at_last_remna.html:

There is an old line from Fay Vincent, the baseball commissioner who suspended George Steinbrenner for conspiring with a known gambler, Howie Spira. Steinbrenner paid Spira to get some dirt on Dave Winfield, for whom Steinbrenner had no use, and Vincent caught him doing that and kicked him out of the game.

Vincent said at the time that Steinbrenner had heard no moral alarm because “none sounded.”

There was no moral alarm for Bernie Madoff as he systematically ruined fortunes and pension funds, and ultimately lives, and didn’t get stopped until now. He is the biggest thief we know about, but only for now, because he is caught. You wonder how many more like him end up in orange jumpsuits before this is over.

I love that phrase, “no moral alarm sounded” — never does for sociopaths, must be quite an advantage over us.

Attorney Mark Mulholland (representing Madoff investors), http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/12/14/2008-12-14_new_jersey_couple_joins_heartbreak_list_.html:

“He had this polished, magnetic approach that made folks want to invest their money with him. Everyone wanted in. From time to time, he would also reject potential investors. That just made other folks even more keen on getting into the Madoff fund.”

What a con! Folksy, magnetic. Laid a trail of candy for his marks to follow.

I have often heard it remarked that these conmen are soft sell artists.  I believe that is only superficially true.  I think that they are actually using all their abilities and concentration.  One way of looking at it is that they are running quintuple time mentally, so much so that they appear relaxed and nonchalant on the surface.  I once knew a sociopathic Don Juan who was so talented that his targets thought they seduced him, but really he was that far ahead of them (all the while adjusting his personality to his reading of the mark’s ideal and again laying a trail of bread crumbs/candy).

Top rank sociopaths are so good at what they do that their manipulations approach the realm of “weaving reality.” I would predict that Madoff approached this level.  When I was in management at E.F. Hutton I hired a couple of sociopaths.  One had eyes that were just pools of trustworthiness – it was almost impossible not to trust him.  In turned out that he was a fraud, he couldn’t do half the things he had said he could do.  Obviously I should have tested him more.  The other one also interviewed very well, including great eye contact.  Hutton went out of business soon after, I later heard that he had been fired as a psychopath by a law firm.  He was said to be a workplace bully and a puppetmaster manipulator whose specialty was turning people against each other and getting individuals fired.

Charles Ponzi was so smooth that many victims begged the government to set him free to continue his magic. Apparently, sociopaths gain this persuasiveness and manipulative ability due to a different brain structure.

Habitual Liar Brains Look Different On Scans

Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang have found that habitual liars have more white matter and less gray matter in their brains as compared to less lie-prone people. [ emphasis in original]

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/003035.html

Finally, I would recommend paying close attention to those regulatory officials who gave Madoff a pass or looked the other way.  Due to both personal experience with corporate human resource departments and outside observations I believe that sociopaths recognize and protect each other, even to the extent that non-criminal sociopaths will often protect criminal sociopaths.

More Madoff:

How could Madoff not have made any trades for 13 years?


More Madoff — for sociopaths there is no such thing as an ingroup

Earlier posts:

Welcome to our sociopaths-gone-wild-economy

Commonalities between Wall Street speculators and/or Fed bankers and sociopaths

Low hanging fruit – the idiots who lead America

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The engine driving increased public awareness of sociopathy: personal experience

November 30, 2008 by pathwhisperer

The following websites are examples of individuals being driven to share their knowledge, come to grips with their experiences or warn the unwary.

Dealing With Diabolical Danielle Weblog
 http://able2love.wordpress.com/
A “Beware of Poison Ivy” site.

Holy Water Salt
a blog about irradiating evil through “light”
http://holywatersalt.blogspot.com/
Both a personal experience and general knowledge site.

Charmed, I’m Sure
http://documentarycharmed.wordpress.com/
Seems to be notes of personal experience intended to be used in a documentary.

Questions About the Book
http://www.whenyoucryicry.com/blog/
The emotional devastation of falling for an emotionless sociopathic mimic.

Lovefraud Blog

How to recognize and recover from the sociopaths – narcissists in your life


A big get together — shared stories, outrages, speculations.  The testimonies here may seem unbelievable to the inexperienced or uninitiated but they’re very real.  A few quotes below (emphasis added):

I too raised a psychopath, who has murdered once and tried to murder me. I also raised two young men who are fine men.  . . .

. . .

This past year when my P son and his cronies were trying to kill me (at least, but probably other members of the family would have been targeted after I was gone and when I fled and they couldn’t find me, they tried to kill my son C) in any case, I WAS FREAKING OUT, TOTALLY INSANE, UNABLE TO THINK OR FUNCTION. . . .

. . .

I understand the pain of realizing (finally) that your child, the child you planned for, gave birth to, nursed and loved is a monster beyond redemption. I understand the emotional and yes, PHYSICAL PAIN, of turning your back on that child (even though they are now an adult) and emotionally burying that child in your heart, as if they were dead, to at least preserve the memories you had of when the child was an infant, a toddler, and a young child that was the shining light of your life. I sort of feel like my child died and his organs were donated, but the MAN who has his organs is a monster, and not my son, any more than it would be if his kidneys or his eyes had been donated instead of his whole body.

The memories of the “morphing” years when he quit being the shining child and became the monstrous adolescent, then murdering man, those were the most difficult years of my life and I held on to toxic hope for 20 years after I should have “let go”—but I guess I thought the letting go was so painful I couldn’t handle it, but I know that the NOT LETTING GO was MORE PAINFUL and became so painful it was LET GO OR DIE. I chose, finally, to let go and live. It was so hard, harder than anything I have ever done.

Unlike Todd, I have my own monster out of my house, but I keep the guns CLOSE because I never know as long as he is alive when he might send another of his friends to try to kill me, for revenge, if no other reason. Both of my other sons and I are armed, or within reach of a gun at all times, day and night

http://www.lovefraud.com/2008/10/10/sociopathic-children-and-psychopathic-traits-during-childhood/comment-page-1/#comment-13740

She uses the kids as pawns. She molested her son, he told his therapist (at 4 years old). Drew pictures of her vagina, doesn’t like hair in his mouth, wet the bed, the whole nine yards. She got out of it. We’ve been in custody hearings for a year and a half. The judge feels SORRY FOR HER!!!

http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2008/09/22/letters-to-lovefraud-how-can-we-deal-with-the-sociopathic-ex-wife/#comments

pathwhisperer says:

I’m with Holywater (10/10 9:53 am) when she says:

“I think once you’ve been around a p you know the difference- they’re not insane, and once the mask slips, or you catch a glimpse, it’s nothing you’ve ever seen before unless of course you’ve known other p’s.

I recently was asked to prove my p was/is unfit for a position, nothing I said/experienced matter…lucky for me I track him- so I proved through concrete evidence “he says one thing, does another”

Recognising a p is not rocket science.”

It’s that “oh, moment” you look for . . . . To decide if someone may be a s/p I at first follow a rough checklist but then I wait for a gestalt type emotional/mental “click” or “oh, moment.” It is only at that point, if the answer is yes, that I can say ‘yes, that person is a s/p.’ And I agree it is not rocket science, anyone with normal emotional intelligence can do it.

I also agree that to communicate with others you have to concentrate on the s/p’s behavior. The “oh, moment” of recognition is not transferable to others. They have to go through their own emotional/mental processes to get there.

http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2008/10/09/the-sociopath-next-door-probably-not/#comments

The New Yorker writes about researchers’ struggle to study psychopaths

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_seabrook

. . . Although the story is comprehensive, one of the points made me think that we at Lovefraud have a better understanding of psychopaths than researchers.

“Unlike most academic psychopathy researchers, Kiehl has spent many hours in the company of his subjects. When he meets colleagues at conferences, he told me, “they always ask, ‘What are they like?’ These are guys who have spent twenty years studying psychopaths and never met one.” . . .

This is scary—many researchers in psychopathy never met one? We should consider ourselves better informed, because we’ve all had extremely close encounters with these predators. And we know exactly how the ones who are not in jail behave.

http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2008/11/10/the-new-yorker-writes-about-researchers-struggle-to-study-psychopaths/

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Are SAPs (Socially Adept Psychopaths) Real?

November 16, 2008 by pathwhisperer

Obviously I think they are.  It’s why I write this blog. From my Mission Statement:  [My aim is] to share information about sociopathy and sociopathic behavior in everyday life. “It’s as though there’s a dangerous fish in all the waters of the world, that is never mentioned”  https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/about/.

To the best of my knowledge, the term SAPs originated with Roger Canup.

In the last section I pointed out that the problem of plausible lies is the most serious problem facing humanity today. I will now discuss the people who have been telling plausible lies: the Socially Adept Psychopaths or S.A.Ps (pronounced SAPS) of the world. An example of S.A.P. thought processes is in order.

Most people have heard of Ted Bundy; the serial killer who was executed in Florida several years ago. Not many people are aware of the fact that Bundy was studying to become a prosecutor, and that eventually he hoped to become a judge. Those that do know that fact see it as some strangely ironic twist – an inexplicable quirk in Bundy’s bizarre makeup. It never seems to occur to most people that the perfect place for a psychopathic serial killer to hide in society is as a prosecutor or a judge; but I assure you that it occurs to the Psychopaths of the world. I would estimate that about 10% of the prosecutors and judges in the United States are in fact, S.A.Ps. The ONLY difference between them and Ted Bundy is that they were able to control outward signs of their Psychopathy until they achieved their goal of being in a position of authority.

http://users.hal-pc.org/~rcanup/sap.html.

For most of their lives Thomas Capano and Ira Einhorn passed as SAPs, in my opinion — it was only the insult to the ego of a lover leaving and the subsequent murder of same that exposed them.

Thomas Capano
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Capano

Ira Einhorn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Einhorn

If the murdered women and others in their position had known enough about sociopathy to suspect it in these cases perhaps they wouldn’t have gone back one last time, gone back to retrieve their belongings alone, tried to do the right thing and explain why they were leaving in person, tried to stay just friends, agree to meet in private, etc.  In my opinion, it’s incredibly irresponsible of law enforcement and the media not to inform the public about sociopathic criminals.

Brain Scans Show Abnormalities In Psychopaths

Adrian Raine’s “successful” psychopaths are essentially the same as SAPs.

In the study of the hippocampus, the research team [led by Adrian Raine of USC] expanded the scope of previous studies by comparing the brains of two groups for the first time: “successful” psychopaths – those who had committed crimes but had never been caught – and “unsuccessful” psychopaths – those who had been caught.
. . .
 The difference between successful psychopaths (those who avoid getting arrested) and unsuccessful psychopaths is that the more successful ones have a greater ability to learn fear of getting caught and to therefore guide their own behavior to minimize the chances of getting caught.
. . .
“There’s faulty wiring going on in psychopaths. They’re wired differently than other people,” Raine said. “In a way, it’s literally true in this case.”

He found that the psychopaths’ corpus callosums were an average of 23 percent larger and 7 percent longer than the control groups’.
. . .
With an increased corpus callosum came less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness – the classic hallmarks of a psychopath, he said.

“These people don’t react. They don’t care,” Raine said. “Why that occurs, we don’t fully know, but we are beginning to get important clues from neuro-imaging research.”

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001998.html

More recent and widespread research can be found at the linked Swedish site, It Affects Us All.  Their research page is Forskning, http://user.tninet.se/csz433c/homepages/evah/html/forskning.htm.  The research links with English synopses are towards the bottom.

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October and November items with that sociopathic flavor

November 15, 2008 by pathwhisperer

I look for news items featuring (in no particular order) preternatural lying abilities, an arrogance with no discernible justification (and a related contempt for others and extreme “watch me get-over” attitude), beyond-the-pale crimes, a willingness to simulate the most intimate emotions, individuals who view others as pawns to be manipulated or even destroyed for the enjoyment or greater glory of themselves, the ability to effortlessly and artlessly turn on sincerity, etc.  All of these have to be far above and beyond normal faults, crimes and vanities.  As always I’m simply suggesting that the following news stories merit the consideration of sociopathic elements.

Celeb Designer Guilty of Rapes, Assaults – Anand Jon Alexander

LOS ANGELES (Nov. 14) – Celebrity fashion designer Anand Jon was convicted Thursday of raping and sexually assaulting aspiring models as young as 14.

“He humiliated, degraded and took what he wanted from them. He was a predator who took advantage of the weak people around him. He has no criminal sexual borders. If he didn’t use force, he laced their drinks,” prosecutor Frances Young told the jury. Jon, whose full name is Anand Jon Alexander, denied the charges. His lawyers said the girls and young women were revenge seekers who had made up their stories or who had “invited what happened,” and that there was little physical evidence.

http://www.popeater.com/television/article/celeb-designer-guilty-of-rapes-assaults/248201
Blaming the victim is very frequent in the defense of sociopathic crimes.  Also one will often see sociopathic defendants testifying in their own behalf (or even representing themselves) when it is not at all in their interest to do so.  However their imperial ego can’t imagine defeat, they can be almost pathologically optimistic.

Jersey City Councilman Steven Lipski is No. 1 threat at Washington club

A drunken Jersey City councilman was arrested for urinating on a crowd of concertgoers from the balcony of a Washington nightclub, police and club sources said Saturday.

. . . . .

“He was very drunk,” the source said, noting that it wasn’t the first time Lipski had caused a ruckus at the popular concert venue. “We’ve dealt with this man before,” the source added. “He’s never peed on anybody, but he gets really belligerent and drunk.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/11/08/2008-11-08_jersey_city_councilman_steven_lipski_is_.html

IMO, one should always pay very close attention to anyone whose behavior goes totally off the scale when intoxicated – no matter what the individual’s station in life, education or title.  The slim self control a sociopath may have in the best of times can be totally lost when drunk.  Hervey Cleckley in the attached Mask of Sanity (p. 355) writes:

57. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without

A major point about the psychopath and his relation to alcohol can be found in the shocking, fantastic, uninviting, or relatively inexplicable behavior which emerges when he drinks

. . . . .

Alcohol, as a sort of catalyst, sometimes contributes a good deal to the long and varied series of outlandish pranks and inanely coarse scenes with which nearly every drinking psychopath’s story is starred. Free from alcohol, such a patient would scarcely sit under a house all night idly striking matches, or, concealing himself behind book stacks, urinate from the window of a public library on passersby in the street below.

http://cassiopaea.org/cass/sanity_1.PdF

Woman Says Father Held Her Captive and Fathered Two Children She was Forced to put up for Adoption

His wife, identified as Teresa B., said on private TVN24 television that the man used to order her to watch television whenever he went into the girl’s room, closed it and took out the door handle.

“My daughter was frightened and did not want to talk about it,” the mother said. She learned the facts when she found her daughter’s diary, the mother said. She said the man beat her and her daughter when they asked that he stop the abuse. “He intimidated us; he threatened that my daughter will be dead, that he will destroy us all, if anyone learned about it,” Teresa B. said.

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/1284642-father-held

This story is both similar to and quite different from the crimes of Josef Fritzl (https://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/reflections-on-josef-fritzl/) — illustrative of the complex crime and ramifications of incest.

2 Dutch men guilty of injecting 14 with HIV
All victims tested positive after being drugged, assaulted at a sex party http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27681660/wid/11915773?GT1=31037#storyContinued

How AIDs and its spread hasn’t put sociopaths on the public radar is beyond me.  I can very easily imagine sociopaths doing the above.  At their level of personality development if they hurt they want the world to hurt.  To hurt and not act on that hurt is interpreted as an attack on the self.  Many of them never reach the stage where there is a self separate from their wants and hurts.

An early job of mine was as an international phone operator, back in the days of electrical switchboards with multiple leads.  I had a co-worker who was friendly and fun loving but with some odd habits.  Whenever he had a difficult customer that left him feeling insulted he would afterwards call up one of his standard “whipping boys,” customers that he considered good for a few laughs.  As a sociopath, which I certainly didn’t know then, he was unable to internally handle his emotions.  If he was hurting someone had to pay, even if that someone had nothing at all to do with the hurt.  Not to express that hurt would have left him feeling angry and frustrated.

I recall a case from a few years ago of several dental patients who came down with the same strain of HIV that their dentist had recently died from, but no likely transmission mechanism could be found.  I think it was probably intentional for the same reasons.

The so-called AIDs Patient Zero, Gaetan Dugas, was a sociopathic flight attendant with hundreds if not thousands of lovers of both sexes (since sociopaths only know friction orgasms, the more, the merrier).  Since then, sociopathic AIDs victims with no concern for others have been a real problem for both gays and straights.  I once read in a Gay Men’s Healthcare article a discussion of whether to publicize the role of amoral sociopaths in the spread of AIDs, but the decision was not to, since they wanted the focus to stay on the danger being the disease AIDs and not the carriers, as I recall.

Woman With 5 Dead Spouses Leaves Jail

RALEIGH, N.C. (Oct. 16) – A Georgia grandmother who came under suspicion because all five of her husbands had died was released Thursday from a North Carolina jail where she had been held on charges in one of their deaths.
Betty Neumar, 76, posted $300,000 bond late Thursday morning at the Stanly County jail, where she’s been held since her arrest in May, Sheriff Rick Burris said.
http://news.aol.com/article/woman-with-5-dead-spouses-leaves-jail/214595?icid=100214839x1211612354x1200699438
Skylar Deleon Convicted in Gruesome Yacht Killings

SANTA ANA, Calif. (Oct. 20) – A man was convicted Monday of murdering three people, including a couple who were tied to an anchor and thrown off their yacht off the California coast [after posing as a prospective buyer].
http://news.aol.com/article/man-convicted-in-gruesome-yacht-killings/215258?icid=100214839x1211902378x1200740020

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Playing with the human mind — let’s erase memories

October 23, 2008 by pathwhisperer

Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice

Joe Z. Tsien

Joe Z. Tsien

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20081022/hl_hsn/scientistserasespecificmemoriesinmice

The Spotless Mind

Alain Brunet

Alain Brunet

http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/alain-brunet

Isn’t this a little backwards? Why not try to do something about psychopathic criminals rather than erase their tracks (not that it’s likely to work, IMO)? What’s the purpose here? To torture people for hours, get the desired information (the primitive and simplistic sociopathic mind just can’t get it that torture doesn’t work) and then erase the unpleasant memory from the victim’s mind? Don’t try to stop rape and murder rampages, but erase the survivors’ memories? Don’t stop sociopathic officers at checkpoints from ordering their men to fire on cars filled with families, just erase the shooters’ memories later?

Basically I’m with Startrek’s Captain Kirk:

“Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor.  You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves! I don’t want my pain taken away! I need my pain!”

http://www.startrekfans.net/lofiversion/index.php/t29330.html

This is just my gut feeling, but I’m not sure that sociopaths would even understand that view, they certainly wouldn’t care about others.

Also I believe that human nature is just too corrupt for this kind of power.  It’s been only about 150 years since we had organized slavery in the U.S.  Has human nature changed?  Slavery still exists here and there in the world or even occasionally here in the United States (usually with illegal immigrants — of course, even if not overt, they essentially live in a state of economic slavery).  Or look at corporations, they go overseas and revert to using child labor or near slavery conditions.  Give corporations sociopathic freedoms and they will follow sociopathic dictates.  Furthermore, otherwise decent (but weak) individuals will follow the companies’ interests and corrupt normals will continue to study at the feet of sociopaths for the secret of conscienceless corruption and evil.   There’s been no progress when it comes to who we are.

The Spotless Mind’s Alain Brunet works at McGill University.  That seems to ring a bell. . . .  let’s see . . . McGill . . . memory erasing . . . depatterning . . . Ewen Cameron!  Aha!  McGill was famous as the home of Ewen Cameron’s depatterning experiments.  He sought to take subjects (his fellow human beings) back to a white slate, erasing memories and even personalities through drugs, brainwashing and certain torture techniques.  I don’t think he was exactly successful, though he did create a number of vegetables and otherwise damaged human beings.  Being a monster psychopath, humans were no more than ants to him.

“McGill’s Psychiatry department was founded in 1943 by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron. Although Cameron continues to be a subject of controversy, there is no doubt that he was a great builder. In 1944, the Allan Memorial Institute opened. The site was Ravenscrag, a stately mansion located on the slopes of Mount Royal, which was renovated to house an institute of psychiatry.” Cameron then led both the Allan and the McGill department of psychiatry until 1963. [emphasis added.]

Ewen Cameron

Ewen Cameron

http://www.medicine.mcgill.ca/Psychiatry/history.htm

“Continues to be a subject of controversy”?? Josef Mengele is still controversial too, I suppose.  It’s worth noting that Cameron led McGill’s psychiatry department for twenty years.  In addition he was served as president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association.  For more info:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron, http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/resources/part1/chapter1.

So apparently Alain Brunet is following in the great man’s footsteps in a university that still has not seen fit to disown him. Further, I’m not tremendously reassured about Alain Brunet’s connections with the U.S. military: grants (http://www.douglasrecherche.qc.ca/profiles/details.asp?l=e&id=15) and work in military hospitals (http://www.dialogues-cns.org/htm/annuaire/b.asp). It seems his intent is to cure PTSD (post traumatic shock disorder) among soldiers by erasing memories.

When checkpoints fail

When checkpoints fail

In 2006, Brian Palmer quoted a Marine officer as saying only 60 out of 1,000 deaths at Iraqi checkpoints were of “bad guys” (weapons or explosives were found in the vehicles later), the rest innocent victims.

“The corporal at Mojave Viper laid out a few more reasons why drivers don’t always stop. “Maybe his wife’s pregnant — he ‘s trying to get her to the hospital. That happens all the time. Maybe he’s just a fucking retard.” Marines make mistakes too, he allowed.”

http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2006/07/stop-and-kill.html (the late and lamented Steve Gilliard’s blogspot)

Absolutely, such actions will leave the soldiers and Marines with PTSD (sociopathic soldiers/Marines and officers on the other hand won’t be affected in the slightest). However, it seems to me, that for memory erasure to work against PTSD, the memories would have to be erased almost instantly (or extremely shortly), before the event percolated through the different layers of the psyche.  Children who have been abused or suffered a great loss (such as the death of a parent) under the age of three have no memory of it but it affects their lives profoundly.  One way of putting it is that a child won’t remember the parent or the death but will remember the loss.

So will these soldiers have their memories wiped clean everyday, after every engagement, what?  The movie Groundhog’s Day comes to mind.  Do they think Americans raise their children for this?


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Low Hanging Fruit — The Idiots Who Rule America

October 23, 2008 by pathwhisperer

That’s combining, of course, the title of Chris Hedges column in Truthdig of Oct. 20 and a phrase from Andrew Lahde’s So long, Suckers letter. Hedges column, including a section of Lahde’s farewell letter: The Idiots Who Rule America The elites have just made monkeys of themselves. The only thing greater than their greed was their stupidity (or is it the other way around . . .). This is, literally, a defining trait of sociopaths — childlike, they just can’t see tomorrow, can’t anticipate the likeliest of events (even the high IQ ones). And then Andrew Lahde comes along and beats them at their own game, beats the Masters of the Universe. Then, sauntering off with his winnings, calls them “Low hanging fruit.” I claim to know the sociopathic mind. If I’m right, then that one is going to hurt.

I don’t know what percentage of the financial elite are actually sociopathic — but that percentage does seem to have been in the driver’s seat. Or maybe it’s simply that corporations, having been given sociopathic freedoms, evolved that way. I tend to think that there’s a bad seed core of actual sociopaths, their corrupt hangers on (IMO the corrupt often seek to learn the secret of conscienceless evil from sociopaths) and then the many who go along to get along.

Sociopaths are non-self referential. They only know they are doing well if others are doing badly. For them, and their corrupt friends, there is no such thing as a rising tide lifting all boats.

What motivates workaholics? A hatred of life. Most people want to work hard enough to take care of their families and a little more. Workaholics live a two-dimensional life: me superior, you POS. This lifeless drive for superiority is all they have — this is doubly true for sociopaths. Lahde: “I will let others try to amass nine, 10 or 11 figure net worths. Meanwhile, their lives suck” So long, suckers. Millionaire hedge fund boss thanks ‘idiot’ traders

It is worth noting that our true leaders are mega-corporations and the mandarins who lead them. The people who we think of as leaders such as politicians are no more than servants or cabana boys and girls to them. They proved this in their rolling over for the “bailout bill” against the clear wishes of the American people.

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Suzy Bass — What is Pseudologia Fantastica?

October 23, 2008 by pathwhisperer

She Said She Had Breast Cancer—But She Lied

Glamour

“Suzy Bass had less than a year to live. The Knoxville, Tennessee, high school math teacher was battling stage IV breast cancer, and it had spread to her shoulder and heel. . . . “Everyone just loved her immediately. We could tell her anything.” . . . Webb’s students dedicated their prom fund-raiser to her . . . A week before the big dance, though, the school received a series of troubling phone calls. Bass, they said, was making the whole thing up. . . . A week after getting exposed, Bass pulled down her Facebook account, changed her phone number and disappeared. In her wake, she left a community of angry, bewildered people with many unanswered questions: How did she do it? How could we not have known? And the biggest, most puzzling one of all: Why?”

I first learned of pseudologia fantastica from a Discovery Channel documentary, Why We Lie. The only reference to the documentary I can find is at a business ethics site (they are extremely harmful to the workplace): Why We Lie

Though the word wasn’t used, it was apparent that pseudologues were also sociopaths — guileless manipulative ability, inspiring pity, geniuses at making others feel sorry for them, the truth was of no concern, amoral, etc. Apparently some researchers agree, some don’t — but there’s very little material on pseudologues. Wikipedia entry

From the few (two to be exact) I believe I have known I would say they are definitely sociopathic, but with a twist. Most sociopaths are not impaired at all in terms of reality testing. Pseudologues however don’t seem to realize there is a difference between reality and the stating of it, apparently unaware that reality is actually real. Furthermore, apparently their brains are structurally different. Habitual Liar Brains Look Different On Scans

The ones I knew were extreme sociopaths, they might as well have been emotionless machines that could calculate the proper emotional response incredibly quickly. In acting terms, the reaction was however a beat off, a noticeable delay — but why notice if the sociopath is saying everything you want to hear or has drawn you into their fantasy or has captured your caring nature to take of them.

Latest pseudologue (9/10/10): One more cancer hoax story: Jessica Vega, http://www.aolhealth.com/2010/09/08/jessica-vegas-cancer-hoax/. While the article doesn’t mention pseudologia fantastica or sociopathy directly, it does mention antisocial personality disorder which is a great advance.

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Welcome to our sociopaths-gone-wild economy

October 11, 2008 by pathwhisperer

It’s all a question of confidence, don’t cha know? There is no reality, it’s all perception management! Bring out the Plunge Protection Team. The PPT can juggle an infinite number of balls in the air for an infinite amount of time — and never drop a one. Perpetual motion machines work so well — how about a serial bubble economy? Pay the piper? — ha, ha that’s for the little people. Parties never end! Create more debt through derivatives than the amount of monetary value existing in the world? — Brilliant! Hey, why don’t we call that debt, wealth? Capitalism can be risk free! Spread the risk through mortgage backed securities and derivatives — uh, the engine of capitalism is the balancing of risk and reward on an individual level. Conmen do best when unregulated!

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Commonalities between Wall Street speculators and/or Fed bankers and sociopaths

September 24, 2008 by pathwhisperer

Inability to recognize predictable outcomes.

Belief that the party will never end.

Belief that facts don’t matter, only perception. (This is particularly true for pseudologues — simultaneously pathological liars and sociopaths.)

Overweening arrogance.

Inability to self-regulate or restrain the self.

Strange use of words. “We need oversight” when the very structure presented allows no oversight whatsoever by design. Sociopaths seem to think that words have a tangible realty in and of themselves, as opposed to having meaning only and as far they do in fact represent reality. But I forget, it’s perception that matters.

180 degree lying: “public service,” “taxpayers’ interests come first,” calling uncollectible debt assets, etc.

All that said, I’m not inclined to consider either Paulson or Bernanke to be actual sociopaths, at this point. Except for the arrogance and contempt I don’t see what I look for in attempting to ascertain sociopaths. Of course, both of them are polished public performers, so they are well masked. However, also, their lying just isn’t that smooth — think of burglars who convince law enforcement personnel to hold the ladder.  . . . Hmm . . . Or think of Charles Ponzi whose own victims asked for his release from jail to continue his magic. I do think of Bernanke and Paulson as conmen, but while all sociopaths are conmen, not all conmen are sociopaths.  I’m not dogmatic about this however, these two (or one of them) may very well be sociopaths.

Charles Ponzi, of course, reminds us of the long history of sociopaths in economic flim flammery. I have no doubt that this fiscal crisis is the direct result of not restraining sociopathic bankers. In prisons, sociopaths are often model prisoners because proper behaviors are clearly delineated and punishments for crossing same swift. The same needs to be true for investment banks, stockbrokers and investment bankers. If corporations are given the freedom to act sociopathically, sociopaths will climb to the top and/or corrupt individuals will follow the sociopathic example.

Further, it’s hard to imagine anyone else who would believe a serial bubble economy would be viable. All sociopaths are cause and effect disordered. This childish sense of cause and effect cause sociopathic inventors to invent and reinvent, over the ages, perpetual motion machines. A let’s-inflate-bubbles economy is the economic equivalent of perpetual motion. If the perpetrators and looters come across as “learned worthies,” all the better for their purposes.

I don’t believe the Paulson bailout plan is actually intended as a bailout plan, at all — it is merely a swindle to take care of themselves and their cohorts before worse happens (one last chance for the looters to have a go at it). In solitary investment bank bankruptcies you see this all the time, management will reward themselves great bonuses knowing that the house is going down and that ordinary employees will lose their jobs and much of their 401Ks.

I was at Drexel when it went bankrupt. Shortly before the denouement, the directors called a meeting to discuss what was happening. Many of the support staff showed up, after all their lives and livelihoods were being severely impacted. Also, to my experience, most of the foot soldiers of Wall Street are very proud to be working for Wall Street and Fortune 500 firms. Once seated, a chosen secretary informed the assembled group that it was for banker professionals only. Even in a lifeboat, the Drexel bankers would allow no thought of equality or that anyone else could matter.

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Recent stories deserving of a closer look

September 24, 2008 by pathwhisperer

“Chinese baby milk toll escalates”
BBC

A country whose corporate liars culture is even worse than ours — imagine that. Enforceable contract laws and public health regulations are an absolute necessity. Unrestrained sociopaths in business and commerce leads to disaster.

It seems Britney Spears has overcome likely sociopathic bullying
MTV

Her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, certainly fits the profile of a sociopathic conman who lives off of women (as did Thierry Roussel, Christina Onassis’ fourth husband). After her divorce, Britney was often described as having gone crazy or as having a breakdown. All I saw was someone who was very upset — just what you’d expect from a woman who discovered she’d been lying next to a mimic with only pretend emotions (except for the contempt). Furthermore, she was reported in the press as stating that her husband had slept with her mother. Just what you’d expect him to try if he were a sociopath.

I once had a long discussion with a sociopathic acquaintance about invisible-to-third-parties harassment campaigns. The aim is to make the victim appear crazy to the outside world with the harasser escaping any blame. This is what seemed to be going on here. So-called psychologists and therapists were even jumping in with “borderline” comments, with no or little first hand knowledge.

In no way should Kevin Federline be awarded sole custody of the children. A truly gigantic, but generally unknown problem are sociopathic jurists siding with sociopaths appearing before them. I’m not saying that is the case here — I know nothing about the judge. But at the very least he was initially taken in by KFed’s “innocent me and poor, pathetic Britney” routine.

“Monogamy gene found in people”
New Scientist

Hmm, this could be even more interesting.

“American Psychological Association Members Pass Historic Ban on Psychologist Participation in U.S. Detention Facilities”
Psyche, Science, and Society

Now if they could only get the sociopaths out of the torture supporting APA leadership. Sociopaths frequently go in to psychology fields in an effort to “join art with science.”

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