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

"You have to forgive her," he tells her. "Her generation aren’t used to foreigners. Jealousy and hate, I know it so well. She’ll get over it in time." His eyes are moist and she sees five hundred years of pain. She hugs him and wonders how her mother can be so small-minded. She tries to kiss him, and he turns away. "I’m tired," he says, "Tomorrow."

They are always in debt. She doesn’t understand it. Before she met him, she’d never owed anyone money. She saved every month. Now, it seems she is scrabbling at every turn. They spend so much, on wasteful luxuries. Trips they can’t afford. Eating out, several times each week. A new car. New furniture. The worst part: he neglects everything.

He takes the car and brings it back with scratches. Then, dents and broken lights. What happened? she asks, furious and shocked. "Some idiot backed into me," he says. It is always someone else’s fault. "Did you fill in the insurance form?" she asks. "He drove off! I called the police of course."

She gets the post. Credit card statement. She opens it, glances at the total. What?! She reads again. No mistake. It’s more than her monthly salary. Her hands tremble, as she looks through the details. Some mistake! This isn’t her. She tries to make sense of the text. Her mind is slipping on ice. She grapples for balance.

The bank! The number is there on her statement. She calls them. Give me a real person… give me a person… ah.. "There’s been a mistake on my credit card" she blurts. They calm her down. Client number. Name. OK. They check. Madam, was your credit card stolen? "No," she says, "no, it wasn’t. I have it right here." Sorry madam, these are legitimate purchases. All confirmed with PIN code." She frowns. Who else knows her PIN code apart from her husband…?

When he comes back from his studies, she confronts him. He denies it flat out. "It’s one of those websites you shop on. I told you not to trust the Internet," he says. "Cancel the card, and if the bank won’t refund you, change banks. Damn thieves." It does not end well. She argues with her bank manager, and closes her accounts there. After years of the same bank! She sits shivering in anger, fear, insecurity. Her world is collapsing.

One day, she is too sick with flu to go to work. In the post she gets a letter with a court summons in her name. Unpaid traffic fines, more than a year of them. Her mind finds itself on slippery ice again. This is impossible! She parks with such attention! There’s a number for the bailiff. She calls to ask for details. The female voice is happy to explain. Eleven different parking violations. Unpaid despite many reminders for each one. Fines and costs are now over three thousand dollars. She sits in shock, unable to process.

I’m going mad, she thinks. I can’t take this. She weeps slow hot tears as she takes the bottle of sleeping pills, and puts a handful in her mouth. The black void pulls at her. Come, it says, why fight?

And then her phone rings. It’s him. "Where are you?" he asks, without pause. "At home," she tries to say. It comes out as a nasal mumble. "Don’t expect me home this evening," he continues, as if she’d not spoken. "I’ve got stuff to do, put the garbage out, OK?" He cuts the conversation. She holds the phone, stares out of window at the wordless city.

In her mind, an ancient door slides open. Something steps out. "No," it says, "not that way. We fight." The bottle of pills drops from her hand. Cold anger wipes out her self-pity. She spits the pills out onto the carpet.

She goes to the cupboard where her husband keeps his papers and books. It’s locked as always. She has a second key that he never knew about. She opens it. Inside there are piles of papers. She takes the piles one by one and goes through them. Finally she sees it: a plastic bag with letters. They are all addressed to her. Dozens and dozens of them.

The tickets. Then reminders. And second reminders, then final warnings, and penalties, and letters from lawyers…

She confronts him when he gets home. Waves the papers in his face, shouting, what is this? What IS this?

He looks at the letters, and then at her, and then explodes in rage. "You looked through my papers? How DARE you?" He slaps her, once, and then again, harder. She falls to the floor, in shock. He kicks her in the ribs, in the face, in the back. He shouts. "Never." Kick. "Touch." Kick. "My stuff!" Kick!

In the hospital, they recognize her name, and call her mother. The doctor checks her daughter. Nothing broken. She asks, "Did he do this?" and her daughter nods. She calls the police, who send a unit. They write up a statement, and then go to arrest him. He does not deny hitting her. It was her fault, he explains. She told me I’m too poor for her, and she kept taunting me with racist slurs. In the end I couldn’t help it, I got angry. It’s terrible, and I feel so bad about it. He is crying, miserable, a broken man.

He is not charged, instead they both get warnings, he for assault, and she for hate crimes. Much later, at home, he tells her he’s sorry, and that he loves her. She looks at him, and sees the man she fell in love with. For a brief moment she feels the connection again. She wants this so much, and she’s so afraid of what comes next. And then she remembers his violence, his lies, his stealing. The other voice speaks. " Get out, " it says, and she takes a step towards him. "Make me!" he says, but takes a step back.

When we meet others suffering from abusive relationships, our first response is often disbelief. "Leave!" we say. "Change jobs! Divorce! Move out!" Yet that is like saying to a sick person, "Get better!" The victims find themselves tied down by a web of lies, promises, and threats. Escape can seem impossible. Captivity and suffering seem inevitable.

In this chapter I’ll describe the second half of the psychopathic relationship: the Feeding. The word sounds like there’s a deadly blow. A bite to the throat, then the ripping of bloody flesh. Yet, that’s not how it generally works.

What we see is the victim accepting, even embracing their situation. If others criticize them, they become defensive, and hostile. They protect their abuser, praise him or her. They produce tortured rationalizations that make you ask, "are you crazy ?" to which the unspoken answer is, "yes, at least for now."

How does this happen? How does a psychopath force adult humans to accept such pain, neglect, and violence?

I’ve been researching mind control techniques since the late 1990’s. I stumbled onto the Cult Information Centre [45] http://cultinformation.org.uk/question_what-is-mind-control.html , a website describing how cults work. The loss of self within a consuming group… it was familiar. It reminded me of working in large businesses. Or military service.

What I found interesting was how many of these techniques seem to work both ways. One theme that we’ll see in this chapter is pushing people into a juvenile state of mind. The adult mind needs real (even small) problems to chew on, and freedom to solve them. It’s like a muscle that needs real work and freedom to move. Take away real problems, or remove freedom, and the adult mind weakens and shrivels. This leaves the juvenile mind unprotected. And that is far easier to push around.

If you give people full freedom and responsibility, then their adult minds get stronger. This can make them rebellious, if you are a tyrant. What it also does is unleash a self-controlled creativity.

My business is making software. To be more precise, I build on-line communities, and help them to make software. One tactic I used was to take the cult techniques and reverse them. Cults use arbitrary, inconsistent rules. Healthy communities need consistent, pragmatic rules. Cults form a pyramid of power. Healthy communities form a network of peers. And so on. Cults tell their members what to do, and when. Healthy communities self-organize around real problems.