Sociopath is so, like, the new vampire?

I recently came across one of the stupidest things the internet has to offer: a blogpage and subsequent  book purporting to be flying the flag for being a sociopath. Or at least it would have if the author had dared put her actual name on it, which of course she didn’t. And let me tell you, while I may empathise with the plight of a sociopath, I also probably don’t because, according to this totally accurate and unquestionable diagnosis, I am one. On a side issue, that is probably a concern; how can a sociopath empathise with other sociopaths? Sounds like this post’s lame joke, but it’s not. 

But it got me wondering why it is that anyone would want to claim to be a sociopath, and when you think about it, a huge portion of people lay claim to their own identity and moral goodness by identifying with being something that they’re not, and then pretending to not actually be true to that nature due to their moral strength. I know, confusing...but let me explain. 

Vampires...

When I was a kid, vampires were scary. They were also evil. They didn’t have a past. They were strong, however not strong enough to stand up to the two Corries and a grandfather who regarded them as the one thing he could never stomach about living in Santa Carla (cue Echo and the Bunnymen). Then Dracula got a back story (I know, we’ve talked about this before). Speculative fiction, vampires in particularly always present an easy reference to the rule of the Aristocracy and can also easily see connections to women’s rights and animal rights issues. 

Vampires; these cool, strong vicious beings exist solely at the expense of their prey. They suck the blood, the very existence out of their fellow man without fear or favour, almost without conscious thought of what they are doing. The same way many people chow down a steak or drink a glass of milk without thought to what that has cost to produce. The same way people eat chocolate that has been made by slaves; the same way people wear clothing that has been produced by people who would actually be in a better situation if they were slaves (they’d have more to eat). 

But I digress...

Think about Michael Emerson’s situation in the Lost Boys; new town, new people, people who are very strange...then all of a sudden there’s this uber-groovy chick. He pursues her only to find out that she’s part of an uber-cool group of dudes who have their own mega-cool pad. 

Everything now has limitless possibilities for Michael. They live in an abandoned, luxury resort. They live outside the scorn and rules of the everyday for some reason. They spend their time mucking around and having fun. They don’t seem to work, yet they have access to massive resources. They were just cool. Then, all of a sudden, you get to see why. You get to see the source of their lifeblood. You get to see what monsters they are. You can see the easy reference to the Feringhees and the like (and by that I mean the English, not the fictional Star Trek race, although there may be something in the presence of fangs and fixation with consumption over production; having, over doing). 

In the Lost Boys, there is little to be said about why the vampires are bad, although Michael was tricked into drinking the blood, and it is implied that so was Star and Laddie. So there may be an assumption that all of them were in a similar situation at one stage. 

There is a strong presence of a possessive love in The Lost Boys. Star wants not only to impress and love Michael, but to possess him, to consume him, as does David. David’s claim that his blood is running through Michael’s blood is such as statement of ownership, of consumption. Then he dies in a very Christ-like pose. 

David’s death is a break away from the traditional understanding that bad guys should die because they are bad guys. Think about Dirty Harry’s defence that he didn’t beat up the bad guy “...because he looks too good.” Bad guys should die because they do bad things, rather than are bad people. David’s death reintroduces the predominance of action over character. The history of Western thought can be boiled down to that statement of Jesus “I am the way, the truth and the light”, being boiled down to him just being the light thanks to Newton, Darwin and Freud. This morality brings back the existential; the moral character is the definition of action in a continuum, not in isolation. 

The moral rule introduced by this is that the good guys can’t just kill the bad guys, if they do, then they’re bad guys as well. The good guys now have to wait until the bad guys try to kill the innocent guys and then they can kill the bad guys while trying to save the innocent guys. This is the only way the good guys can do bad things (murder) and still be the good guys. Action takes precedence over character. The problem with this is that the bad guys can be not bad guys by refraining from acting as much as the good guys can be bad by failing to refrain from acting, which is a contradiction as it brings back chance and circumstance into the moral worthiness of a character.

 

Then Le Stat and Louis de Pointe du Lac came along and their existence and relationship seemed to muddy the sexual/gender boundaries. They were very much presented as strong, dominant-classed males, but their sexuality was hugely distorted toward bi-sexual, slanting more towards gay than straight. They were dominant characters, but they were not dominant males, their gender was ambiguous. Louis’ relationship with Claudia is more a mother-daughter relationship in the context of Le Stat being the father figure. This story is a story of possessive love, of consumption at the expense of the other (I know, you’re shaking your fists at me and screaming ‘well that’s not love then, it’s rape’...the love of a sociopath). Louis’ repression of his inner self gave him moral power over Le Stat. It gave him a refined intelligence that the animal-like Le Stat never possessed. He was good because he was refraining from bad. He was good because he killed the bad guys after the bad guys killed the innocent guys (Claudia). He was made better because he freely chose to brag about this to Daniel Molloy. He is the perfect post-structuralist, disenfranchised self: he is strong and powerful, yet moral only because he chooses to not use this power; to not be true to himself. Meet the paradigm of the modern retail monkey or public service office dweller. 

Then along came vampire characters such as Angel and Vittorio di Raniari whose stories were tragic and forgivable. These stories were different; while most of them were still first person narratives, you couldn’t help but be enthralled by the character’s evil, female vamp lover/sire. Their story was almost as tragic and forgivable. But they were stories of strong and lost moral figures who had succumbed to love and fallen prey to that love, but had then become owned by it. They were love stories of a new kind. They reversed the gender roles, giving the historical female sire the power, knowledge and ownership of life that, at the point in time when the stories were set, were completely owned by the patralinear, male hierarchy. Yet the female sires were not completely a male image; they still aesthetically tricked their lovers in both stories. They still became very subservient to their new, empowered lovers. 

You’re sitting there knowing that I’m going to bring that up aren’t you? 

Yes, well, then there was Twilight, that spun that same love story back around to the traditional gender roles, but with a further twist which didn’t sit well. The vampire was a male again, but was he really a male? As a character, Edward was not dominant, either conversationally or physically. Bella is the pursuer, the whole way through the series. Even with Jacob, who is the more stereo-typical male role, it is still very much Bella who is the pursuer. Bella is also peculiar in her knowledge; she is well-read and scientifically minded; beautiful yet unaware of this. She exaggerates her knowledge and undervalues/downplays her aesthetics, a very stereotypical male thing to do. 

The last thing Edward wants to do is to consumer Bella, to possess her due to that being his true nature. At the same time, it appears that nature itself has made Bella for him by his inability to read her. He is that killing beast, yet chooses not to be in order for peace and love and skittles to rain upon everyone. The Cullens are all this way; they are bloodthirsty beasts, they are animals, but they chose not to be. Their power, knowledge and abilities would appear god-like to an average human, yet they chose to not use this at all, especially not for personal gain. 

The bad guys in the story, the James Coven, are just the older definition of a vampire. They would completely fit in in Santa Carla. What exactly is wrong with them? That they are true to their nature. The Volturi are not overly believable as a concept, the inability of the strong to accommodate the weak will eventually make them weak, but we’ve talked about that before too. 

Sociopaths...

Have you ever noticed that a lot of people seem to greatly over-exaggerate their own health conditions? There seems to be a correlation between how dull a person is, and how great their imaginary, wiki-diagnosed conditions are that they keep at bay. 

I remember many years ago, when I was younger, many people who would get a slight headache would run around and say that they ‘always’ got the most severe migraines imaginable. Being around people who actually got migraines, it kind of annoyed me that some people would over-exaggerate their condition. But it seems now that people don’t get migraines or headaches anymore, they get fibromyalgia. I must have come across this claim ten or more times in the last little while. 

We don’t ever get the sniffles anymore, yet our incidents of bird flu does seem to greatly exceed the reasonable expectations.  We’ve talked about the wonders of social media before and the like but one other thing life in two dimensions tends to give us is a polarisation of our existence. No one ever gets depressed anymore, we all get Bipolar, which is the new black. We all get depressed, while standing up for the people who are depressed, but only those people who are excusing their appalling behaviour with it, never the person who actually suffers from it. 

At the very least we get clinically depressed. I am not sure what the difference between depression and clinical depression is, but the later sure sounds more worthy of our concern, doesn’t it? I recently found out that this long-time friend of mine has been suffering from clinical depression for decades. I really couldn’t work that one out given that depression is generally feeling down in the dumps without an ability to change that and without an explanation as to why that is. Yet if I were living that guy’s life, working his job and married to his wife, I’d be depressed too. I think there’d be something wrong if he weren’t depressed given what he puts up with. 

Nowdays, we all have access to the wonders of Wikipedia, where we can log on and diagnose ourselves with whatever excuse we want, and it gives us references for us to pretend to have known. “The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn.” 

So there is this Sociopath blog and subsequent book that is purported to have been written by a seemingly self-diagnosed socio-path who is also a legal academic, Sunday School teacher and Mormon. In reality, it is probably nothing more than a good reason as to why a lot of people should choose a career in middle management rather than study comparative literature. She identifies sociopathy as "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others" It is interesting to note that this definition seems to come from the very outdated, 1987 version of the Dignostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Perhaps the updating of the DSM in 1994 and since which removed the word Sociopath and replaced it with a broader category of ‘antisocial personality disorders’ , is to blame. This doesn’t sound nearly as PG13 scary sexy now does it?  

This person claims that she “...might have been a good lawyer but I gave up practice a few years ago, because it got boring, and I realised I am not very interested in helping people or corporations. I would much rather indoctrinate them, which is why I became an academic.”   

What a load of rubbish. The sector of the legal community who are interested in helping people would also recognise a sociopath in about three seconds. We have to, it’s our job and our safety depends on it.  

This person also claims to have had sexual encounters that, the way they are described, would constitute rape in most states, but gosh do they sound naughty...

She “...occasionally [has] liaisons with men or women outside of my principal relationship, when a person happens into my life whom I feel a desire to possess...” She goes into detail about this one time, at band camp, she strangled her;

           “..."date" in my parked car. We had talked before about sexual domination, and so by then I felt I had implicit permission to bruise and strike, which is to say that I was reasonably certain that there would be no retaliation for my violence. I turned toward her and could see the question in her eyes: were we about to kiss?

I slapped first - hard across her face so that I could feel the memory of high, sharp cheekbone on the palm of my hand for several seconds afterward. I could see the shock flash across her face, then turn into fear, finally settling into a soft understanding, and then an open and hungry desire. She later told me that she did not feel out of control until I wrapped my hands around her neck and began to squeeze, because she knew that I was strong enough to really hurt or kill her. She said, though, that she trusted I wouldn't hurt her and therefore felt adored.

I have strong arms and I might have killed her if I thought there would have been no consequences, but there were myriad reasons for not hurting her that had nothing to do with my feelings of adoration, not least of which was her prohibiting me from doing it again. I wanted to do it again, and I would several times after that night.”

 Well Sinead O’Rebilion...shock me shock me shock me with that deviant behaviour. 

The problem is, you can’t just pick up the DSM and say “hey, I sometimes lie to people, I have borrowed money off family in the past, get restless sometimes, has spent more on gambling than I used to...hey...I must be a pathological gambler”. Especially given I don’t actually lose money gambling. You see, in order to pick this book up, I would have to have an event that has led me there – a totally breakdown in my ability to control my life due to this behaviour. 

The reason as to why our sociopath in question picked up the book was “she started to see a therapist...remembered a casual diagnosis a co-worker of mine made years earlier that maybe she might be a sociopath.” So she picked up the word, the term...wikipedia...

There has to first be a reason as to why you (or preferably a trained psychologist) picks up that book. That’s the premise under which the book was written. There has to be an event, a breakdown, a failure of the mind that indicates that you are in some way “maladaptive and inconsistent with developmental level”.  You also can’t pick up on one section of the book, one page, one diagnosis and take it out of the context of the rest of the axioms of the book. 

But now we have this champion of the intellectually disenfranchised; this person who deals with the unsatisfactory nature of daily life with an emotionless and rational calculation. All these boring as fuck admin bods now have a new Edward Cullen to dream about, only this time, it’s themselves. It’s their apparent ability to destroy everyone around them  while they do not engage this ability that makes them good and worthy. They don’t have to do anything for this identity; they don’t need to learn something, get fitter, get fatter, get anything, but they, in their own mind, will get an acceptance of sort over their life. 

So the end of all of this is an understanding that there is a great deal of people who regard morality and strength as the possession of a weakness that makes them strong (sociopathy or being a god-damn, shit-sucking vampire) but it is in the rejection of that inner most quality that makes them good. Some people will be a lot happier to live the life more ordinary if that is a choice to remove the beast within them. When that beast isn’t there, they make one up. That eternal struggle, that dualism has been destroyed, the Apollo in us sings loud, but this is not good unless, and only if it is a conscious ache for the repression of the Dionysian, the animal that will mindlessly consume friend and foe alike if we let it.

I am not sure about this.   

BTW - Sorry for the excessive links in these last few posts, I won’t do it again, except for this one about why men don’t listen, which you know is going to bug you until you click it...

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote:

“What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.”

This post’s lame jokes:

A guy goes in to see a psychologist. He says, "It seems I can't make any friends. Can you help me, you fat slob?" 

***************

 A man goes to a Psychologist and says, "Doc I got a real problem, I can't stop thinking about sex."

The Psychologist says, "Well let's see what we can find out", and pulls out his ink blots. "What is this a picture of?" he asks.

The man turns the picture upside down then turns it around and states, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologist says, "very interesting," and shows the next picture. "And what is this a picture of?"
The man looks and turns it in different directions and says, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologists tries again with the third ink blot, and asks the same question, "What is this a picture of?"

The patient again turns it in all directions and replies, "That's a man and a woman on a bed making love."

The Psychologist states, "Well, yes, you do seem to be obsessed with sex."

"Me!?" demands the patient. "You're the one who keeps showing me the dirty pictures!"

This post’s inappropriate over-share: 

Recently, I’ve notice that I sometimes find myself singing ''bi di doo'' quietly when talking to someone on the phone to end the conversation - they either think their phone is going flat or I'm going slightly mad...either way, it's all good..

Bye now...

[cough]

Bi di doo

[awkward]