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

In fact a business entity is a one-way trapdoor. It stops debt moving back onto investors. Most often the investors are not the ones running the business. Without such a trapdoor, Mallory can borrow heavily, steal the cash, and run off.

Modern States demand annual accounts from businesses. They give owners the right to inspect these accounts. They let owners question their business managers to justify them. They often separate the roles of treasurer and chief executive. All this reduces the scope for fraud.

So the core of modern business law is an anti-psychopath defense.

The French proverb Les bons comptes font les bons amis applies here. Some misinterpret this as "debts must be repaid as fast as possible." It just means that any relationship must balance.

If you look at the accounting, an abusive relationship shows up right away. "We’re in an open relationship," Mallory says. He knows Alice will try harder and harder to get him to commit. Meanwhile he is "free" to sleep with other women.

We’ve evolved many defenses against predators looking to empty our real or social wallets. Another of those defenses is the ritual of gift giving. This is a fascinating part of human culture. We get so much pleasure from our rituals of exchanging gifts. And particularly when they are heavy with emotional value. We get such pleasure from making a successful gift. That shows how important the ritual is.

Gift giving can take different forms. I believe that it’s fine to work for free. It is also fine to charge a full price for your services. The first is a gift. The second is a transaction, not an investment. What I will not do is work at less than my worth, on the basis of future rewards. This is something I’ve learned to avoid, unless I’m working for myself.

You should be free to walk away from any relationship, at any time. This includes personal, business, and social relationships. It does not mean lack of commitment. It means clarity and freedom. When a relationship is healthy and makes you happy, you have no reason to end it. And when it is unhealthy and makes you unhappy, you should not have to continue it.

Mallory must keep Bob captive and docile while she feeds. She most often uses words rather than chains. She is a convincing speaker, quick to find the right thing to say. She is always confident and dominant. To hold Bob captive without chains, she keeps him in a state of confusion. There are many techniques, and I’ll try to cover the main ones.

There is a certain kind of lie that Mallory uses, called "gaslighting." He does this to confuse Alice, by messing with her memory and sense of reality. The term comes from a play and 1944 movie, "Gaslight." As Wikipedia notes [48] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting , "Sociopaths frequently use gaslighting tactics. Sociopaths consistently transgress social mores, break laws, and exploit others, but typically, are also charming and convincing liars who consistently deny wrongdoing."

Some classic forms of gaslighting are:

❂ To lie about important past conversations. "You told me I could borrow the car! You even gave me your credit card so I could fill the gas tank!"

❂ To lie about past agreements. "We agreed you would invest in my firm if I tried to get you a meeting with the vice-president. Well I tried, and now you owe me that investment!"

❂ To lie about irrelevant details. "No, we didn’t have Italian yesterday, it was sushi. You had the maki, remember."

❂ To lie about others' perception of her. "Everyone tells me how paranoid you have become."

Mallory prefers to lie in private. When Alice is alone and cut off from other people, she wants to believe Mallory. Faced with a constant flow of untruths, she starts to doubt her memories and even her sanity. This is a pragmatic tool for mind control. Unscrupulous interrogators can use it [49] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique to extract false confessions.

Mallory lies to confuse her victims. She also lies to conceal. She conceals who she talks to, where she goes, and what she does. She is so secretive about her real life that even her own family are unaware. And Mallory lies for profit, to escape criminal prosecution, and to frame other people. She mixes lies into banal truth, to confuse and distract.

Mallory is Loki, the shape-shifting Norse god of trickery and untruths. Her love and talent for lying are central to her predatory nature. To be a predator is to deceive your prey. When she lies, no matter the occasion, she feels the thrill of the chase.

I’ve seen Mallory lie, and it is a remarkable thing. I’m sure she can stroll through lie detector tests without leaving a trace. It goes further than not showing a stress response. When she tells you that black is a shade of white, it feels better than the truth.

How does Mallory do this? How does Mallory project untruth to feel more solid than mere statements of fact? I think it is another blue egg story. Mallory mimics the signals for sincerity, and speaks with authority and confidence. This triggers our belief response. The more the psychopath amplifies those signals, the more we believe. It is like Puss in Boots' wide eyes in the movie Shrek 2 [50] https://www.google.be/search?q=puss+in+boots+eyes .

To understand how Mallory can lie like Loki, first accept that we all lie. We start lying as young children and we socialize ourselves out of it. We become honest liars. We accept and repeat stories we know are only partly true yet are better than empty space. All stories are lies to some degree. "It is sunny outside" is a lie. What does "sunny" mean? Half-true stories make the world simpler and more digestible. This book is full of such stories. Only a dysfunctional mind cannot deal with gentle lies.

So we all lie, and we know this about each other. It is a human universal. Truth is a negotiated average of semi-lies. We have evolved ways to get more accurate stories by talking to each other. "It’s sunny outside," says one person. "I just saw dark clouds on the horizon," says another. Together they get a better story: "it’s sunny and may rain later." The stories become solid, reproducible. We build them into theories, share them and pass them on.

So as we talk, we exchange fluffy lies and distill them into hard truths. For this to work, we must try to believe people even when we guess they are inaccurate. We measure the speaker for sincerity, and when we see that, we accept. The more sincere the speaker, the more we accept. We can always correct mistakes later.

Social humans cannot fake sincerity, by definition. When we tell an "honest" lie, we are sincere about it. When we tell a deliberate lie, we show tiny twitches. Our imaginations take over from our memories, and the shift in gears shows in our eyes. So, we are honest liars.

Mallory is different. She fakes sincerity like she fakes anger, affection, jealousy, sadness. From an early age she studies others' faces and body language. She becomes a perfect mimic. She is born with this talent, visible in some children just a few years old. She can amplify the triggers at no cost, so she is better than the original.

The second thing about Mallory’s lies is how rich and detailed they are. You can of course catch her out, if you know what is going on. If you don’t then you just get a convincing flood of detail. It is as if Mallory creates an imaginary situation, then describes this to you.

Mallory does not seem to try to remember these imaginary situations. Maybe there are too many, for too many different people. So the reliable way to catch her lies is to record them, and compare them over time.