The Upside Of Your Psychopathic Tendencies

Psychopaths as marginalized community.

From Knowable Magazine, July 19:

The psychopathic path to success
Psychopathic tendencies may be present to some extent in all of us. New research is reframing this often sensationalized and maligned set of traits and finding some positive twists. 

Think of a psychopath and any number of Hollywood villains might come to mind, from charming killers like Hannibal Lecter to Anton Chigurh, portrayed with chilling menace by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men. But the traits and symptoms of psychopathy run along scales that range from weak to strong. So, someone may be mildly psychopathic or severely so. There could be a psychopath sitting next to you right now.

Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behavior has marginalized the study of what they call “successful psychopaths” — people who have psychopathic tendencies but who can stay out of trouble, and perhaps even benefit from these traits in some way. Researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus on which traits distinguish successful psychopaths from serial killers, but they are working to clarify what they say is a misunderstood branch of human behavior. Some even want to reclaim and rehabilitate the concept of psychopathy itself.

“Most of what people think about psychopaths is not what psychopathy actually is,” says Louise Wallace, a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Derby, in England. “It is not glamorous. It is not a spectacle.” Psychopathic traits exist in everyone to some degree and shouldn’t be glorified or stigmatized, she says.

In some ways, the study of successful psychopaths takes the field back to the beginning. In his 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity, the influential US psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley set out the personality profile of a psychopath: a superficially charming but egocentric and untrustworthy person who conceals an antisocial core.

Cleckley (who later identified the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy as a psychopath) drew his insights from people he saw in psychiatric centers. Among his descriptions of psychopaths were people who could keep a lid on the worst of their behavior. He sketched the profile of a psychopathic businessman, for instance, who worked hard and appeared normal except for bouts of marital infidelity, callousness, wild drinking and risk-taking....

....MUCH MORE

So what's your point?  

One of my favorite stories of whack psychology was dropped into 2022's "Covid-19: Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci And The Shutdown Of America" as a quick little vignette:

...In Dr. Fauci's case he is straight-up duplicitous - two-faced - same root as duplex etc. 

It's a mental illness. Narcissistic to the point of being delusional "I am the science" along with the manipulative behavior of the true sociopath makes for an interesting study in multiple psychopathologies. The ultimate political bureaucrat.

Dr. Birx may be even worse.

In addition to the lockdowns deceit she has stated: "I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection and I think we overplayed the vaccines ...".

 

Yuck. For a more lighthearted look at abnormal psychology there's that time a researcher in a state mental institution brought together three paranoid schizophrenics who thought they were Jesus, written up as The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. After a rather tense beginning they each became slightly more accepting of the others but eventually it all broke down:

....The relative friendliness that the men showed to each other – which Rokeach put down to the patients attempting to appear amenable, as befitting their status as the son of God – soon broke down and led to verbal and physical fights between the three "Jesuses".

In one meeting, Clyde declared that Leon "oughta worship me, I'll tell you that" ....

....MUCH MORE, IFL Science, July 6, 2021

For some reason I hear Clyde speaking in Fauci's Brooklyn accent.

Let's see what the other voices have to say 

That's all I've got for mental illness this week. 

Since that was posted we've collected another half-dozen other instances of a) Fauci proudly taking credit for lockdowns and b) denying he ever heard of the term.