Zombies, Vampires and Sleepwalkers; the scarecrow, the tin man and the lion inhabit our psyches. They all make great metaphors for an unconscious and or clueless humanity. But so do the hypnotized, the highly neurotic and the mentally ill. What about the psychopath and the sociopath, the unfeeling robot or Hal the malevolent computer? Are they just too “not human,” too far out or too removed from our ability to relate to them for us to experience them as “like us.”
One thing is for certain, whereas many of the metaphors we have used in enlivening our descriptions of Simple Reality were purely imaginary, many psychopaths walks among us unnoticed. That is because, you see, they are often highly intelligent and very clever at disguising their true emotions, or should we say lack of them.
The dictionary defines a psychopath as “a person with a personality disorder, especially one manifested in aggressively antisocial behavior.” These are the psychopaths that exist in our imaginations because these are the ones portrayed in the headlines, books and movies. They stand out but, as we have just said, there are those that we don’t see and are clever at appearing normal and do not want to call attention to themselves.
Now let us return to the dictionary definition and the “personality disorder” and the “aggressively antisocial behavior.” Since virtually all of us will become aggressive and antisocial when our survival is at risk, under the right conditions, we sometimes fit the definition of “antisocial.” P-B is a worldview in which competition is valued over cooperation largely because the human condition is believed to be a dog-eat-dog struggle to claim a share of very limited assets, pleasures and power.
Our healthy True self when expressed would be compassionate and “non-grasping,” given to sharing and to nurturing one another. We could say that this is normal or non-neurotic behavior. Because the True self personality is not the common experience of the bulk of humanity it is not a stretch to characterize much of humanity’s day-to-day reactive behavior as “like” that of a psychopath if not strictly, clinically so.
So are we crazy? Of course! No sane person would willfully engage in self-destruction or choose and create suffering. Welcome to the Funny-Farm in America. We are not trying to increase your paranoia, we just need to “get real” about what is actually happening around us and what our identity and behaviors say about us. Failure to do this will only intensify our increasingly psychopathological behavior. Our descent into madness is something we don’t want to know about but if we don’t acknowledge it, we will have missed the opportunity for choosing to begin the ascent out of the darkness of our zombie-like, self-destructive behavior.
We should meet an actual sociopath to make our understanding of the actual identity and behavioral traits more vivid. M. E. Thomas’ (a pseudonym) memoir, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Hiding in Plain Sight, supports the “bad news” aspect of the bleak future for a humanity mesmerized by the false self. Admittedly the vast majority of us suffer a different “kind” of sociopathy than does Thomas. Hers is severe. “Thomas self-identifies ‘more as a sociopath than by my gender or profession or race.’” She seems to have already gone over to the dark side while the rest of us are only headed that way.
Thomas considers herself a noncriminal sociopath but is perfectly capable of cruelty and total disregard for the feelings of others. Her lack of feeling ranges from letting a baby opossum drown in her swimming pool: “‘I did not give it a thought’—to the time she cut off all ties to a friend whose father was dying of cancer because the woman wasn’t fun to be around anymore.”
The Hare PCL checklist is used in psychopathy diagnosis. Among the descriptors are “glib” and “superficial” which explains why sociopaths are often less charming or interesting than they think they are. Pathological lying and lack of realistic long-term goals are two more identifiers to look for. No doubt, most of the behavioral traits of the human false self would be found in the clinically ill, probably just much more pronounced in the sociopath.
As a graduate student Daniel Kahneman was in a psychotherapy course where the professor warned about the charming, clever and manipulative psychopath. “‘You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapist misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feelings, are convinced that you understand him, and will be able to help.’ At this point my teacher raised his voice as he said, ‘Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him.”
The most alarming behavior in sociopaths, which is also becoming more prevalent in the global village population at large, is the lack of affect, the absence of “feeling” or compassion. This dying of the light of compassion as indicated by an increase in the ratio of reactions over responses in day-to-day life is a concrete measure of a society losing its grip on Simple Reality. The warning to take away from our exploration into sanity vs. insanity so far is to beware of the psychopath—beware of the false self—they are both capable of causing abject human suffering.
Perhaps zombies are not fictitious creatures at all. We could define a zombie (without including all of the gruesome Hollywood makeup and the awkward and sometimes comical shuffle) as being fearless, without emotions, and an inability to identify with and connect to other human beings. This is the way Thomas describes her behavior and indeed her memoir corroborates that this is her fundamental identity.
Thomas says that she believes she is a sociopath as a result of both nature and nurture. Scientists may one day find the sociopath gene imbedded in the human genome but if humanity would cease its denial, we can easily see how our environment, our story, is slowly isolating us from our fellow human beings and numbing our ability to feel compassion for one another.
If we were to place the True self and the false self on a continuum from maximum compassion (feeling) at one end and the “unfeeling” psychopath at the other, we could see that most of us are not by a clinical definition “psychopaths.” But without a healthy story and identity our dysfunctional behaviors are all too socio-pathological in their results.
For example, we can see some types of violence emerging that are difficult to explain or understand. Are all people behaving in an extremely anti-social way sociopaths? Take the suicide bomber. Few human behaviors could be more violent than mass murder while committing suicide. Clinically ill sociopaths are small in number but sociopaths produced by P-B are much more numerous than in the past and growing rapidly.
“A decade ago [2003] suicide bombings were still rare events. The political scientist Robert Pape counted a global total of 315 attacks from 1980, when they were first established as a modern terrorist method, through 2003. In the following two years, that number doubled. Today [2013], the total is more than two thousand, and each day seems to bring news of more.”
The suicide bomber is only one example of the growth of violence created by the self-alienation produced by our choosing illusion over Simple Reality. If we characterize the clinically ill sociopath as insane, we can also place that label on the terrorist who exhibits similar behaviors. However, from the perspective (narrative) of the suicide bomber, it is the U.S. that is the other, even as Americans are putting the same label on those who see themselves as defending their nation, culture or religion.
“In fiction [for example, John Updike’s Terrorist] as in politics, the enemy’s outlines grew vague and vast; he was too big to be tried in our courts, too deadly to be fought without torture, too radical to be understood. We imagined an enemy worthy of the grief and terror he causes us.” We “imagined” an enemy. There has never been a more profound human insight than these last words. We Americans have “imagined” the non-existent other just as anyone in the global village who contemplates violence “imagines” an enemy.
Simple Reality explains how ordinary young men and women who are otherwise mentally healthy, that is to say, not sociopaths, choose to turn themselves into human weapons. In the context of P-B, our sociologists and psychologists have not been able to explain these deeply disturbing and seemingly senseless acts of violence.
In Ziad Doueiri’s film “The Attack” [2013], the wife of a successful Israeli-Arab surgeon blows herself up in a crowded Tel Aviv restaurant, killing 17 other people. This is a doubly disturbing suicide bombing because the bomber is atypical. The doctor tracks down the cleric who persuaded his wife to blow herself up and gets a typical P-B “non-answer.” “If you haven’t understood a thing since you set foot here, it means you probably never will.” Indeed, it is not possible to understand human behavior unless we can transcend the old story and the old identity which produces our self-destructive and deeply conditioned behaviors.
What we can come to understand is that both the clinically ill sociopath like Thomas and the Jihadi suicide bomber are in effect insane because suicidal or self-destructive behavior is madness no matter the cause or motivation. The human mind and the story that it tells itself have the power to entrap anyone in a cycle of self-destruction. Once entrapped in that maze, as the human condition demonstrates, the solutions of the ordinary human intellect are powerless to lead us to freedom.
Sam Byers, from the age of 17 to 32, despite trying many conventional solutions, could not overcome his addiction to smoking. Finally, he paid hypnotherapist Stella Knight $125 for a 20-minute session. “‘People think you have to be stupid to be hypnotized,’ she said, ‘but actually it’s actually the opposite. The best people to hypnotize are the most intelligent ones. You’re going to be easy.”
When she brought him out of the trance, Stella was lighting up a cigarette. “‘Why are you lighting a cigarette?’ Byers asked. ‘So you can say goodbye to it,’ Stella said. What a load of bunk, I thought as I stood outside her bungalow. I had a packet of tobacco in my pocket (I had, of course, smoked heavily on the way over). I decided to take it out and think about having a cigarette, noting carefully my emotional response.”
“The coughing fit that followed was both rapid and utterly debilitating in effect … the fit lasted at least five excruciating minutes … By the end I was exhausted and completely unable to imagine smoking for fear of triggering another bout of respiratory violence.”
“In the weeks that followed, this happened again, always when I ordinarily would have smoked. I took these episodes for what they clearly were: welcome reminders of my boundless susceptibility to suggestion, which as any good hypnotist will tell you, is just another term for intelligence.” Most of us are hypnotized by our P-B identity. Each of us has the “wisdom within” to act as our own therapeutic hypnotist to free ourselves from our self-destructive habits.
As the human condition continues to express increasing violence, mental illness, and a general descent into chaos, we can choose to understand our role as individuals in this growing socio-pathology or we can choose to change our role and enlist the wisdom of the awakened mind in shifting our story and identity. We have boundless resources beyond the maze of P-B that will free us from the illusion of the other and the suffering created by our current socio-pathology. We are crazy zombies all right even if we don’t have the surface “appearance.” The problem is not superficial. We will have to look deep within to escape from the Land of Oz.
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References and notes are available for this essay.
Find a much more in-depth discussion in the Simple Reality books:
Where Am I? Story – The First Great Question
Who Am I? Identity – The Second Great Question
Why Am I Here? Behavior – The Third Great Question
Science & Philosophy: The Failure of Reason in the Human Community
