Contrary to a prevailing myth, sociopaths are really no smarter than the average individual”¦probably dumber. Sure, a good one can dupe you, but as I’ve written elswhere, this is no great shakes, as most of us can dupe each other if that’s our goal.
That’s because we enter relationships risking trust and faith in each other, which makes the exploitation of our trust and faith really easy. It takes no genius or particularly smart, crafty person to exploit this trust and faith. It’s as easy to do as it’s wrong.
And so, most sociopaths aren’t really that clever, or ingeniously bright. Most make messes not only of others’ lives, but their own too. Many end up in jail, and those who don’t are often finding trouble in other areas, exercising poor judgement all over the map, squandering friendships, family, and all sorts of meaningful opportunities.
By most standards of a successful life, sociopaths live lives of abject failure, accomplishing little more, at the end of the day, than having produced plenty of havoc and pain. None of this indicates that, as a group, sociopaths are smart.
Sometimes the media sensationalizes the sociopath as the dark, brilliantly predatory monster, especially in classic cases of psychopaths like Ted Bundy. But Ted Bundy wasn’t so smart. In the end, he was nothing but a vicious, sadistic murderer who managed to lure young, naïve girls sufficiently into his proximity to then viciously murder them.
How much of an accomplishment was this? To be able to lure naïve girls near enough to his car to then kidnap and kill them? Otherwise, OJ Simpson style, Bundy was ambushing dormitories at night and butchering innocent, sleeping college kids. Not exactly a genius, or courageous guy, at work here. Just a perverse, murderously violent, cowardly man.
Sure, Bundy was reputedly charming and articulate (video of him bears this out). But this didn’t make him “smart.” He was, clearly, adept at “masking” himself. But again, effective maskers aren’t smart; they’re just good maskers. And nonsociopaths routinely are good maskers.
Good masking, good self-disguising is a type of social skill, and not the purview of sociopaths exclusively. Also, many sociopaths are terrible maskers, just as many nonsociopaths are.
My point is that the “mask” is not an indication of “smartness.” It’s merely the case that some sociopaths, and some nonsociopaths, can mask aspects of themselves and their agendas effectively; but bear in mind, just as many do this very poorly.
In the end, sociopaths, as a group, have a poor track record of living effective lives. Rather, they live disruptive, unsatisfying lives”¦fraught with pathological attitudes and empathic deficits that bring misery to others and, correspondingly, much trouble and, at best, empty satisfaction, to themselves.
Sociopaths simply are not successful people. They may (or may not) skate along under the radar for some stretch of time, but this is not a “game” that smart people play, and that smart people get off on.
Only dumb people play this game. Only really dumb people live this way. Only really really dumb people derive satisfaction, for however long they can swing it, from pulling the wool over others’ eyes.
It’s just no great shakes to do this, and it doesn’t make you smart.
Sky,
You’re just up the road from me lol! I’m from Oregooooon!
New Winter, I also agree with Oxy and LL about your putting up a more professional picture (or none at all) on the new psychopathy information website. Just so you know: I am computer illiterate and phobic. However, I’m forcing myself to adapt to some of the new media/forums because I believe that’s the way of the present and the future.
I posted an article on your new website about why there’s so little psychopathy awareness in the general population (compared, for instance, to how much awareness of domestic violence there is). Here’s the link:
http://jaxymack.com/x/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=187
I’ll also post an article about what is psychopathy, even though someone else already posted a very good, concise list of the symptoms. However, it may help to also have this information written in article form. Plus one about dating Jekyll and Hyde personalities, since that’s how many of us perceive these psychopaths (even though only the Hyde aspect is real). I want to help you lift this new website off the ground, because it’s for a great cause and because I want to see if the user-generated forum can work well and not become a zoo of spammers, jokers and flamers, like I feared:).
LL, Good morning! I hope I’m one of your new email LF friends because you are mine:). I really like this lovefraud community:).
come hither? oh my ~!
Oops! I posted this on the wrong thread!
New winter, I peeked at your site, and I love it! Also you are adorable. So nice to put a face with the personality. I can’t believe you got that site up and running in so little time. In the Buddhist terminology, you are what they would call “big dharma” or big truth. This means you are someone who will have a very large (positive) effect in the world. I am nervous to post on your site though because I would be more visible there. I like the anonymity of this site. I post all kinds of personal information here that I don’t post anywhere else. If someone accidentally got into this site through my email address, they’d really have to dig hard to find a lot of my posts here. On the reptile site where you can pull up everyone’s threads and see every one of their posts, it’s very easy to cyberstalk. I met my spath on that site, and he had read all my threads and posts before he contacted me. (creepy)
Also posted on the wrong thread and moved here (oops):
And LL,
Thanks for your kind words! I’m not feeling too gorgeous right now (see my previous post). I look forward to seeing what you look like, too. Of all the lovefraud peeps who have sent me their pictures, they common characteristics are the kindness and light in their eyes. This seems to be a commonality, and is probably what the spaths preyed on.
LL has a gorgeous family BTW ”“ really beautiful kids. And the wiener dog is too cute for words!
Constantine,
You wrote, “you have to be careful when you start thinking that he is merely acting that way “because something quite terrible must have happened to him as a child”, etc. In fact, all the evidence points to the contrary: that sociopaths come (in most cases) from loving, caring, nurturing, and even highly privileged environments. And yet THEY STILL TURN OUT TO BE MONSTERS. Indeed, one of the biggest fallacies I see on the part of newbie sociopathic victims, is this notion that ’he or she (i.e., the S.) is just a wounded little boy or girl who is acting out simply because they want someone to love them.’
You wrote, “it almost always has nothing to do with childhood trauma”
“we try to fill in the gaps by positing imaginary “childhood abuse”, or whatever; but the truth is that the gaps can’t be filled in”
With my ex (SPATH, I allege), if I was to believe what he told me, there WAS childhood trauma. He told me his gay male cousin had oral sex with him when he (alleged SPATH) was 12, and his cuz was about age 15. He told me that his sister let him WATCH while she masturbated (he was still a minor) .. and I DID see a family home-made movie with his family, where he was an ankle biter. It showed him BULLYING another kid. The family members just laughed, as if it was “cute” of him. He also had a juvie history (he told me, for stealing or breaking into cars.)
In the first year or so, of living with me, he told me that a scar on his arm was from burning himself with a torch accidentally. At the end of our years-long relationship, he told me that the burn scar ACTUALLY came from him playing “chicken” with a lit cigarette between his arm & the arm of another [teen?] boy, to see who could keep it there the longest.
He told me he cried when his older sisters argued, that he hid under a table and covered his ears. He told me that his sisters paid him to wash out their panty hose.
He told me, in the end, that his niece told him that his father used to come into her bedroom when she was a teen, to molest her. More than once, during all those years with him, at family events, he would ask his sisters, “Did dad do anything untoward with you?” .. go figure.
I was not sure what to believe or not to believe about what he told me, but the incest stories he presented, I am inclined to believe. Either I am to believe what he told me about those things, or not.
So..I am inclined to disagree about the “no childhood trauma” thing. I suspect he has both dissociative ID disorder & BPD, but, of course, I’m no therapist.
~ Zim
New winter, I wish you well with your new site and I am sure from a technical point of view you have it together to make it work. However, I think I am going to elect to stick around here at Love Fraud rather than spread myself too thin and end up not being able to accomplish anything at all.
I hope you will be able to get contributors who are experts in the field and have good solid material to contribute so that myths won’t be spread. Also I hope that somehow you are able to keep the trolls and flamers controlled as well, I think those are going to be your two biggest hurdles. Good luck. God bless.
Oxy, I’m glad you’re here. I need a (very gentle) boink with the skillet today. You know you have to be in the right mood to go out dancing at a bar. I don’t do it very often these days, though I used to do it all the time and always had a blast. Last night I went out with a few gf’s. I was not in a great mood to begin with. As I saw all the gorgeous younger women entering the bar, my spirits sunk even lower. I should have just gone home. But I stayed and met up with two gf’s. The guys were oggling all the younger girls, including my two younger friends. I looked as good as I could possibly look, and was friendly and flirtatious as much as I could be. And NO guys talked to me. It was demoralizing. I know part of it was my mood, but that’s never stopped them before. Not that I want to meet a bunch of alcoholics at bars. But it’s fun to get out and flirt. I feel like I’m just too old to use this as an ego boost any more. It’s a cruel trick of nature that the sexier I feel inside, the less attractive I am to men on the outside. I know it shouldn’t matter to me, but it’s still a hard pill to swallow.
So if you want to hit me with the skillet, go right ahead.
Here here Oxy Let me hit her with the skillet~!
New Winter, please listen to what Oxy just said:
“I hope you will be able to get contributors who are experts in the field and have good solid material to contribute so that myths won’t be spread. Also I hope that somehow you are able to keep the trolls and flamers controlled as well, I think those are going to be your two biggest hurdles.”
These are my main concerns about the new psychopathy website too, because being user-generated, you can get bad quality posts and insulting or spam comments. I hope that you’ll keep an eye out for those, to start off on the right foot in terms of QUALITY. If the quality of the articles and of the comments is consistently good, then people will trust it and the website will be helpful to them.