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

Except it’s not that simple. Prey and predator are in a constant arms race. We can predict that some ants will evolve to imitate their spider parasites. We can predict that some social humans can and must play the psychopath game. Predator mimicry is an interesting idea, and I’ll come back to it later.

Sure, I’ll tell you what happened.

We had a rocky relationship from the start. I’m a large guy and usually pretty chill. Yet we fought all the time. And I mean, all the time! There was no real reason. Sure, I look at other women sometimes. I’m human. She’d freak out. "Hey you," she’d shout at a waitress who I’d said hi to. "Do you want to go out with my boyfriend? Do you?"

We stopped going out after she got into a fight. Some woman had called her a whore, when her boyfriend stared at my wife’s legs. Short shorts, right? I told her she’d been showing a lot of skin, men were going to stare. "So you think I’m a whore, do you?" she said. "No," I sighed. "He called me a whore in public, in front of everyone!" she said, to anyone who would listen. For years.

I thought she was insecure and jealous. She’s so good looking though. I was so in love. So in love. My family loved her too, told me I’d found the right woman, told me to look after her. So that’s what I tried to do.

She started going to college, evening classes. I paid her tuition. "It’s our money," she said. To be honest I don’t know why I wanted to marry her. But I did, more than anything, and she said "yes" right away.

About a year after we married, my unit deployed to Iraq. We spent our last night together, and she cried, and told she would wait for me. Only two months later, our Humvee hit an IED. It was like I flew overseas to get blown up. I was in hospital for a month and then they sent me home on disability.

The decision happened so fast I didn’t have a chance to call her. OK, I thought, I’ll surprise her. I’m back from work, honey!

I got back to our place and the house was empty and quiet. The plants were dry and going brown. There was mail, a lot of mail. I walked through our home, and sat on our bed. The side cupboard was a little open. I pulled it open and saw this little beaten-up black notebook. I’d never seen it before. Strange.

I opened the book and read it. It crammed with letters and dates. "A.H.B, 3-12-05." The same letters showed up over and over. They were peoples' initials. Beside some of the names there were figures. Money, could be. There was an entry every few days, and the first ones dated back to years before we met. There, I found our first few dates. I looked through twenty pages, to the end. The dates continued until a few days ago. I recognized the last initials. J.A.K. One of my best friends, across the street. Wife and two kids. Not possible. No harm taking a look, right?

So I got up and walked outside and crossed the street and rang the doorbell. He opened it, then went pale when he saw me. "Have you seen her?" I asked him. He pointed over his shoulder, into the house. I walked inside, and there she was, in a towel, on the sofa.

She didn’t even blink. She stood up, and shouted at me, "What do you think you’re doing here?" She was screaming at me, "You bastard, almost getting killed! I thought you were dead! It was terrible! How could you?"

What, I said, what the f? Why are you naked here with Jon?

Jon kept saying, "sorry man, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize what I was doing, sorry man." It was obvious he meant they’d been sleeping together. Where’s Judy and the kids, I asked him. "She left, about a month ago, when she found out," he said, starting to tremble.

A month ago.

All the time she’s shouting at me, threatening me. She’s accusing me of sleeping with whores in Iraq. She’s saying I betrayed her from the start.

"Hey," I say to her, "look what I found!" I hold out the book. She lunges for it, shouting, "Mine! That’s mine, give it to me! I swear I’ll rip your eyes out! You piece of shit!" She’s saying the most horrid things.

I tell her, "I’ve read it and taken pictures of every page. I’m going to find every one of those guys you slept with." That’s not the word I used. I tell her, "I’m going to find these guys and tell each of them what kind of trash you are."

She stared at me, completely blank, for about a quarter of a second. I’d never seen her make that expression before. Like her face froze while her brain was doing some kind of calculation. And then she shrugged. "Fuck you, you piece of shit" she said, went to dress, then left the house.

I had a few beers with Jon, months later when I’d pulled myself together. Poor guy never knew what hit him and I wasn’t mad at him. He’d just saved my life. I was so lost. Two years we were together. I loved her so much. When I got back to our place, her clothes and papers were gone, and so was she. I never saw her again, though I spent a while looking for her.

When we ask why someone acts in a certain way, the answer is a mix of pragmatic logic, learned habit, and emotion. This is as true for psychopaths as it is for the rest of us. Despite appearances, logic and emotion are not opposed. They work together in a complex dance that I’ll explain in this chapter. The dance has many steps, and each step plays out in specific ways.

To learn the dance of the emotions is like learning to read. Emotions are a language. It is an ancient language that we share with many other species. The language flows through us, and between us. We speak it with our bodies and faces. We feel it in our blood as music. We move to the music without conscious decision. We must answer the call of emotion, even when it hurts and damages us to do so.

Mallory can make others dance. This is a talent he does not need to learn. Yet he is as lost as any of us, when it comes to his own music. He does not decide to hurt others. He obeys an ancient logic. He is a rock rolling downhill, obeying the logic of gravity. In this sense, Mallory is an innocent.

In this chapter I’ll explain each step of the dance, and its music. Each emotion is distinct and consistent. Every emotion has a cause, and consequences. These connect in chain reactions. These chain reactions keep us alive. The dance may seem primitive or wasteful. Sometimes it is. Most often it is not.

When we know the dance, we can tell the difference. We evolved for a different world, one with fewer people and more dangers. Much of our mind responds like a idiot savant. It often cannot tell the difference between reality and accurate caricature. Time and again, if you confront Mallory, you will realize this. You know his masks are fake, and yet they hit you in places you cannot defend. Yet other parts of our mind can learn the difference. We can learn which music causes us pain and harm, and we can stop the dance when we choose to.

Learning to read the emotions gives you a new power. This is the ability to recognize and then control the music, both in yourself and in others.

When we can control the music, we become immune to Mallory and to many other causes of stress. There is no magic moment of awakening. It is a gradual process that takes years. Like any skill it takes practice and patience to master.

Evolutionary psychology aims to explain our mind and behavior as adaptations. It is a solid theory: we are the products of natural and sexual selection, no more or less. I’ve used this approach to explain psychopathy as an adaption rather than a disorder. I’m going to use the same approach to explain our emotions.

Our emotions evolved over time to help our ancestors survive and reproduce. This is not an original notion. The first champion of evolution, Charles Darwin, used it when he wrote "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" in 1872 [78] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_emotion . Some human emotions date from hundreds of millions of years ago. We see these in many other animals. Some date from more recent times, and seem to be specific to humanity.