Psychopathia
Because maybe you don't want to read anymore articles about the Trump trial today...
A couple of years ago I entered an essay competition with the theme of unpopular opinions. I didn’t win. But I was cleaning out my laptop and so I dusted this thing out with minor re-edits for some things that have aged out. And since I’m sure that most posts that you read today will be about the Trump trial, I thought I’d offer you a nice little respite; a relaxing short essay about looking at psychopathy as a collective benefit. There’s a reason they’re around. And there’s a reason why their numbers have become unsustainable.
Perhaps they’re coming to the end of serving their purpose? Maybe they’re about to get flushed out similarly to the way a gut biome finds a way to flush out bad bacteria out of the nearest exit hole.
So, sometimes after reading Political Ponerology but before I made my little AI movie based on my first post, which I’ll include at the bottom since I crave artistic validation (kidding, kinda), I’ve come to appreciate the usefulness of the psychopath. Not unlike finding usefulness of my cancer which has been the impetus for much better living while healing physically and repairing the relationships within my family unit. I know I promised an update about all that, and I’m working on it, but between creating a secular Coming of Age Ceremony for my twins next Saturday and several exciting video projects that I’m working on in tandem, cancer just isn’t all that interesting. The healing journey is worth telling, but I have to put it altogether with some doc footage I shot in Mexico and a highlight reel of the fundraising event we’re throwing in my backyard on July 27th. I appreciate your patience. And I’m grateful for all of you who have reached out with kind words, information, resources, donations, and laid eyes on my writing and creative work, you sure know how to make a broad feel loved.
Ok, enough casual chatter from me, here’s my unpopular opinion competition loser entry:
Revenge Is a Dish Best Not Served
The collective wisdom oozing out of the likes of Substack is most certainly an understated benefit. Even more acutely, the pooled knowledge resource of the covid narrative dissenters who on any given day crunch data, extrapolate outcomes, connect dots and expose fraud, is enough to firehose your brain with facts and opinion alike. A topic that keeps resurfacing is how the culprits will be judged; a Nuremberg 2.0 for the guilty, whoever they all are, with various degrees of punishment served: prison for life at the very least, and off with their heads until they tumble all the way down to hell at best. After the crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated these last few years (who’s counting the epochs, amirite?), how do we make them pay for good? Surely, in order to achieve some semblance of balance, we need to eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth. The Substack dissidents had so much to say in response to Emily Oster’s ill received amnesty article, it would make Dostoevsky jealous. Crimes have been made. Punishments are coming. How else can we make sure this never ever happens again?
Because it keeps happening. The firing squads missed their sacrificial targets and Nuremberg 1.0 felt short of staving off tyranny. No amount of beheaded torsos stumbling around Hades looking for their noggins has stopped psychopaths from emerging. The revolutionaries execute the dictators only to fill the empty thrones and occupy the crowns with more domes that will be blamed into oblivion and the cycle repeats and repeats while we change nothing. The Hydra grows two heads out of the fresh wound where one previously stood, and yet no punitive measure has been able to release our civilization from its death spiral. Revenge is futile.
Revenge, it would appear, is a cheap substitute for actual justice; punishment is weak leverage against systemic rot. Imagine we got all the evil-doers in a court? We can fill stadiums with those who we can point our fingers to for that which has transpired in the last couple of years and then what? Let’s assume we compartmentalize the garden variety psychopaths from the ones that pull the levers. The court proceedings will stretch out for ages, it will consume our minds and satiate our thirst for vengeance, it’ll poison society’s psyche as it becomes entertainment on our scrolling feeds, and eventually, it’ll wear us down just before the new Moloch expresses itself in another fellow human. Revenge is exhausting.
To win over Moloch, you have to sacrifice the part of you that protects you from becoming Moloch; you have to be a better Moloch than Moloch. To face it is to look in the mirror. To war with it is to feed it. It’s time to starve it out. Once we acknowledge the abuse, and recognize the atrocities, and dethrone those in power, and exit the alters upon which we sacrificed, let’s refuse to participate in the ritualistic lynchings of the predators. We can let the guillotines rust over. Predation is not a pretty business. Revenge is self-desecration.Â
By now, you might be thinking that psychopathy apologists should line up against the wall right next to those whose crimes led them there. But what if this unpopular opinion posits that we need the psychopaths. We need them to squeeze our species into the next level of evolution. Psychopaths are the symptoms of our collective dark shadow mind virus which can only be cleared and healed by bringing in the light at the root of the darkness. It’s time we end the omnicidal madness once and for all. Psychopathy is giving us an opportunity to transcend, brothers and sisters. It might not bring the dead back, but it might help us avoid creating monsters. Evolving is a group project.Â
The Psychopaths Are Dying
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It’s true that to enjoy the idea of revenge is to hold inside the feeling of hate. It’s only when you kind of let yourself die and not feel overburdened with the sense of self-defence that you can see the empty pain of the hungry ghosts. They live for a material self, confined to just the body and don’t identify with more than their ego. Careful we don’t do the same.
Battle not with monsters lest you become a monster, said Nietsche.
VA, this essay may give voice to an unpopular opinion, but in my experience, it’s deep evolutionary wisdom you bring us.
I’ve contended with scores of psychopaths and narcissists both personally and vicariously through the sensitive souls I counsel—Psychopaths and Empaths are drawn together like magnets in a shadow dance. Dealing with them is an evolutionary test, in my opinion. Equipped with spiritual power tools, we can learn to ignore, neutralize or redirect malicious monster attacks without becoming monsters ourselves.
Look at the NY jury verdict in the Trump trial for evidence that fighting monsters turns us into monsters.