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

It is how some psychologists get the truth out of people. Ask the same question in five different ways, and compare the answers. A sincere person will tell the same story five times. A psychopath may change the story each time. This is how honest police work, when questioning a suspect. For this to work, I think the questions must come from different people, and over time.

If Mallory has children, they grow up with her lies as a daily diet. The children of narcissists often report having above-average memories for events and conversations. This is anecdotal data. It could be correlation as well as causation. Mallory, after all, has genetic talents for conversation and mimicry. Her children inherit these, to some extent.

Many children of psychopaths describe their parents as "chaos machines." Mallory spreads chaos in different ways. He tends to disrupt the lives of everyone around him. Sometimes it looks like incompetence, sometimes like neglect, and sometimes like simple carelessness. I’ve come to believe it’s deliberate, even if it’s often subconscious. Organizations often use the same techniques:

❂ Chaotic planning, in which Mallory’s time is precious and Alice’s time is worthless. Mallory will make short-term demands of Alice. This interrupts her schedule and makes a mess of her planning. If Alice dares to act like this, Mallory attacks her irresponsibility and punishes her.

❂ Alice may lose all control over her schedule, leaving Mallory to plan her every move. This is typical of cults, and also happens in some relationships and some organizations. Mallory can combine this with sleep deprivation. Then Alice has no private time in which to analyse her situation.

❂ Removing Alice’s personal spaces. Organizations often do this by creating communal areas for working, eating, and meeting. Some psychopathic businesses ban all personalization. They enforce "order" and sterility of spaces, the so-called "clean desk" principle. Since humans are territorial, the lack of any private space damages our self-confidence.

❂ Mistreating or neglecting items that Alice cares about. Organizations may ban personal choices when it comes to items people identify with. Here, you will use a corporate laptop. In personal relationships, Mallory will mistreat Alice’s property: cars, apartments, photographs, clothes. It is violence by proxy. It depresses her, and she then detaches. She realizes she cannot stop such mistreatment. So she stops trying, and stops caring. And the less she cares about her possessions, the less she cares about herself.

So chaos can take various forms. An employer may demand that Bob give up his free time. The firm may send him on business trips without notice. They may put him on irregular and disruptive shifts. At the same time, Bob will have to plan his vacation six months in advance. He may not know until the last minute whether he will actually be able to leave.

In the home, Mallory will go out, and return, without warning. He will bring home spectacular and flashy dramas involving real or imaginary protagonists. He will crash the car and it will never be his fault. He will start disruptive projects like renovations and insist everyone get involved. And he will leave these projects half-finished for months or years. He plans tasks for others, yet rarely shares his own calendar.

If talking to others is hard, maybe Alice can find a quiet moment to herself. Just to process the day’s events. Mallory makes sure this is impossible. Early in their relationship, he will cling to Alice day and night. He smothers her with chatter, intense sexual activity, and passionate arguments. Later, he disrupt Alice’s schedule with endless trivial-yet-urgent tasks, so she cannot relax. And later, he builds up the ever-present threat of emotional and physical violence. Alice retreats into depression and starts to shut down.

Rigid sterile order has the same effect as chaos. Imagine that someone goes into your email every night and messes with your emails. They delete some, move others to the wrong folders, and so on. It is all "clean" and yet nothing is where it should be. At first you get irritated and angry. Then you try to take steps to stop it. When all this fails, you give up and abandon your email. Or, you accept that someone else is now in charge of your life.

In a world of chaos, we regress to juvenile acceptance of authority. This reaction is well known to propagandists, who depend on it. Keep your public on a steady diet of shock and horror chaos. They won’t question the corruption and repression.

Karl Popper wrote: "We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being."

Our superpower, as a species, is to think together about large problems. We do this by building theories of the world. We refine these over time, and we teach them to younger generations. Our minds collect observations and use them to test our theories. We do this from our first to our last breath.

We seem to construct theories out of nothing. We take observations and gut feelings. We chatter with others, and with ourselves. We take the endless theories delivered to us by past generations. We design new, or improved theories. We encode them in language and words. And we argue, remember, and share them.

Popper argued that there are two kinds of theory. There are scientific theories, which we can falsify with data or observations. And there are magical theories, which we cannot. To put this another way: you cannot ever prove that a theory is true. Absolute truth is unreachable, like an irrational number. What is the absolute value of pi? You can try, and fail to prove a theory wrong. When you remove all that is wrong, what remains is a closer approximation to the truth.

We can disprove or improve scientific theories like "Tiny invisible creatures spread diseases." We can neither disprove nor improve magical ones like "Evil spirits spread diseases." Magical theories are not only not true. They are — to quote the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli — "not even wrong."

When a social mind shapes a theory, it remixes existing theories with new observations. It adds in guesses, assumptions, and beliefs. It mixes in myths, legends, hypotheses, memes, and lies. It tries to connect those into a consistent story. The process takes time. In such minds, lies are temporary scaffolding that we correct over time.

Mallory lies to confuse, manipulate, and hide. She does not seek truth, only control. Her mind constructs magical theories in a heartbeat. She describes with complete sincerity. This is an assault, a weapon, a form of violence. In Mallory’s theories, truth is temporary scaffolding to replace over time with lies.

A magical theory has no solution, and can absorb infinite amounts of thought. That disrupts logical thinking. In the software security business we call this a "denial of service attack." Every cult and religion grows around magical theories. So do many business ventures, and many relationships. How can you disprove or improve "Fate means us to be together" as a theory?

Magical theories tend to develop their own secret languages, jargons, and idioms. Invented words often carry magical meanings that the listener cannot negotiate. Psychopathic organizations tend to invent private languages that are confusing and hard to learn. And then they change these languages often and without cause. They force their members to listen to and learn complex doctrines. More denial of service.

Unable to process the flood of illogic, Alice gives up making sense of her world. She accepts Mallory’s statements. She accepts his justifications. She treats him with respect and love, even as he is consuming her.