Pieter Hintjens - The Psychopath Code - Cracking the Predators That Stalk Us

Let’s rewind. Mallory has detected a target. Before the first IDD cycle bites, she is preparing her attack. This preparation is so consistent you can tell where you are in Mallory’s eyes by the mask she shows you. By the time she is idealizing you, you are already entangled. I’ll explain how the entangling starts.

Mallory cannot survive exposure. From an early age he must learn to act "normal." This is a hard challenge, as "normal" is a moving target and a devious one at that. It’s almost as if social humans move the goal posts every day to mess with psychopaths. Mallory often avoids the problem by hiding in plain sight. One way is to act so loud and lurid that people don’t look twice. We call this histrionic and narcissistic behavior.

I’m not claiming that every loud, flashy, extravagant person is a psychopath. There is no accurate visible test for a psychopath, and cannot ever be. This is the balance of evolution. Yet, if you think of Mallory as a cold, gray person, you’re wrong. He is often dramatic, unpredictable, mysterious, ineffable. He is passionate and emotional. It is nonetheless an act, and it fools most except other psychopaths.

Let me draw you a scene to make this clear. You’re in a party, with some friends. There is a woman who doesn’t laugh, makes no expression at all. She looks at you like a butcher deciding which pig to slaughter. Now and then she looks at others, and then looks back at you. She smiles, and it’s not a gentle smile. This would be Mallory wearing no mask. It is a frightening sight, and a rare one.

And there’s a guy, wearing a stupid orange hat, dressed in lurid colors. He’s laughing out loud, a huge stupid grin on his face. Everyone loves him. He’s the life and soul of the party, roaring loud and happy, his face and hands animated. He looks like a harmless fool. If you meet his gaze, you feel warmth and affection. You could fall into that gaze, it’s so deep. That’s Mallory wearing his colors.

Mallory learns his masks from friends and family. He mimics accent and tone, speech patterns, facial expressions, body language. He is a professional actor immersing himself in his roles. He keeps these masks all his life, fine-tunes them, and wears them as needed. These masks are caricatures, yet more convincing than the real thing.

The point of this is to distract and control. It’s the technique of the stage magician. Drama, music, and smooth words get the audience looking one way. And so they miss Mallory’s real moves. It works with a single person, and it works with a roomful.

Once as a young student in York I strolled, with my band of friends, into a small house. The friendly people inside were offering a "free personality test." They let us play with science-fiction machines that measured our stress levels. They sat us down for one-on-one talks. A young woman chatted with me a little about why I was there and what I was looking for in life. She jotted down my name and address, and then started taking notes. "What’s the worst thing you ever did in your life?" she asked me. It was the same casual tone as you’d use to ask someone, "what did you eat for breakfast?"

It was an unexpected cold finger poking into my private mind. I slapped it away and thanked her for the cup of tea, and took my friends and left. One of our group, a girl, stayed a little longer. Six months later we had almost lost her. With a lot of convincing, she stopped going to the group. She stopped spending her money on their weird literature and courses. She resumed her studies.

The friendly people stalked her, and us. They went to her dorm, and followed us on the streets. "Why are you not coming to sessions?" they would ask her, not so friendly any more. "Why are you hurting your friend?" they would ask us, "she needs her courses," sometimes yelling at us as we ignored them. They persisted for more than a year before they gave up.

I’m not mentioning names, as Scientology might take offense. Some years later that psychopathic organization took my cousin. It was years before he returned, a different person, his joy and laughter gone.

People ask me sometimes where my interest in Mallory comes from. My friends and family, and myself… we’ve bled and wept over and over. How could I not notice the parade of predators that stalk us? I don’t make it personal. I don’t get angry about it. Instead, I decode, understand, and dismantle the frameworks of lies that Mallory depends on.

The Interview is one of those lies. It starts as, "I care about you, and we are sharing an intimate moment." It ends with blackmail and extortion. It is rarely so overt as a person writing on a clipboard. More often it happens in a bar or club, or social setting. These are contexts where we expect small talk and are happy to chat. Often there is alcohol involved, so we drop our guard.

Mallory wants to know how good a target Bob is, and what direction to work in. It’s the car salesman asking, "what is your job," then, "are you married?" The probing may be gentle yet is insistent. She slices to Bob’s weaknesses, and the opportunities and risks he presents.

Mallory wants to exclude false positives. That is, people who look like opportunities yet are not. So the questions focus on Bob. There may be theater and drama. Yet the conversation zooms in, and Mallory reads every microscopic reaction and twitch.

The interview is part of a growing promise of some kind: sex, money, or salvation. The threat emerges side-by-side with the promise. If you don’t answer, I’ll walk away, and the promise will vanish with me.

You can tell when Mallory is interviewing you, if she is in a hurry. If she is careful, you cannot tell, as it will happen over days or weeks, or even longer. And the interview can happen behind your back, through people you know.

Often though, you can see it. She is nicer than she needs to be. She smiles a lot at you, and acts dominant in a casual way. She approaches you, not vice-versa. She asks questions about your background, your family, your work, your relationships. It seems rather intimate for casual discussion. Your intuition is uncomfortable. Yet the interactions hit your triggers, and you get dopamine kicks of pleasure. So you keep talking.

If you listen to your intuition, you may feel uneasy with this smiling person. You can of course walk away. Yet it’s plausible she is sincere and interested in you. Walking away from everyone who’s interested in you is a poor strategy. So there’s another defense we often use. That is to keep talking, and switch to neutral topics, or back to the other person.

A person who enjoys talking to you will go with the flow, no matter what you talk about. The ability to play with conversation in random directions is a white flag. Mallory will ease the discussion back in line. She will deflect questions about her own background, or she will lie and exaggerate. She may talk about herself and share "intimate" details yet it is always to position you into revealing more. It is near impossible to spot her lying, unless you catch a specific falsehood.

During the Interview, Mallory will be cold reading his target. This means guessing significant details about Alice in a short time. It is a basic tool of mentalists, con artists, car salesmen, and assorted mystics. Mallory does it without effort or practice.

Most of us are expert in reading people, though we may not realize it. Yet our brains interpret what we see as emotional signals and empathic reactions. We don’t see stress, we feel stress. Mallory sees what is there, with no emotional lens.

Classic cold reading is a party trick, used by mystics to impress people. "You recently lost your father… he is sending me a message for you." In the field, it is more intrusive.