“Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is..and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss. ” -Milton from Paradise Lost
I wanted to write something lighter this evening. As you may have guessed, I’ve already accepted failure. John Milton was not prone to writing light extemporania. And if that’s what you dig on, “Paradise Lost” will not disappoint you.
The battle between what is good and what is evil has generally been framed as a simple case of black & white. Pick the right one and you have chosen wisely. In reality, this is not so easy a task. What you find evil another may find exhilarating and passable. In human terms, not everyone wants the same flavor of the existential ice cream.
The reality is more complex than that. I have my scruples, and even what may be passable as a belief structure. I have recently stopped trying to ensure it can be interdigitated with the societal mean average. It remains a living document but, through process improvement, I feel I consistently get closer to a core formed of substance. I try not to apply it to others but sometimes the shoe just fits.
The dividing line between narcissists and sociopaths is drawn in invisible ink. The two are not always mutuality exclusive and sometimes they exist in a committed relationship. Narcissists want and view things their way at all costs. If you don’t agree you are wrong. With their brand of psychoses control is central. They try to exert their influence over everything they have any concern about. If they don’t care or if they cannot achieve said control then the thing is a statistical outlier, or more concisely, weird to the point of disregard.
Sociopaths share some of this but they focus on the thing, the object, the person. They want to watch it squirm and bend it to their will much like pulling the wings off an insect. There is no predetermined reason other than feeding a sick pleasure. Sociopaths get off on the compliance and eventual pain of their targets. It’s about control to some degree but only as a means to eventually injure.
Still with me? Good. I promise this is going somewhere.
So why am I talking about this cheery topic? Because we must establish our own good and evils. Those personalities are disordered. This means they won’t change. This is how they are wired now and egosyntronic; they don’t realize what they are doing is disordered. To them this is so natural, that if you don’t agree with them you are the one they perceive as wrong or disordered. These feelings are so intense that there is little chance in cracking them. Don’t try, this is one more avenue for manipulation that you open to them. You have something that feeds their disordered needs and once they extract that (or you refuse to give it) they break away. And they will most likely call you names on the way out.
This is where the Hades reference comes in. Both of these personalities hate a mirror to their disordered thinking and they hate that which they covet & control. They hate that which they crave to consume. Don’t let it be you. For whatever reason, they draw something from you. You may not be able to get it back.
I encounter these personalities a lot in my work. Sometimes I encounter them outside my work too. I diligently try to watch out for them. Sociopaths are harder to spot than narcissists. They are very charming. This is the hook. Then they toy with you in some way. And usually they discard you, or you repel them for your own sanity. And to be honest, there are a lot more of them in the world than we think.
For me, these people are part of an evil. I know they don’t realize it but that does not give them the right to me or my mind. So many of us are vulnerable people and these are the hardest to handle.
Be careful out there. The water looks safe but there’s a lot you don’t see.
Beta Testing Adulthood 