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.
Ha ha, you can create a new one, I think, if you create a new email address to use. Woops, I see that I contributed to the problem. I’m sorry!
KatyDid: yes, I can relate to that emotion of not wanting to go anywhere. People ask me all the time if I am ‘afraid’ of ‘IT’.
Unknown to me, ‘IT’ has distributed even more incidence of violence, etc., and I really don’t know where it may come from, how or when but I do know it’s coming. I am not ‘afraid’ of ‘IT’ however I do know what ‘IT’ is like and how violence is something that grows with him. Like an ADHD 12 year old boy, throwing a tantrum over not getting what he wants. Yah, just like that.
I don’t know where my agoraphobia comes from other than not only this situation but finding out in life that all the ‘rush rush’ isn’t so what it is cracked up to be. People, I notice, are becoming more and more primal and non compassionate. I see people being blatantly rude to other people and think I just don’t get it. What is the point to cruelty?
Going ANYWHERE for ANY REASON is a major chore for me.
I so hate it. I only go places I absolutely have to go and I always stay away from people.
This experience with ‘IT’ has completely ruined my entire outlook on things but that’s alright…I will find another. 🙂
Just because I am not afraid of him, doesn’t mean he won’t try something and he already has, I found out yesterday. Not with me but with others. Recently. I wish I could explain it to you but in order to keep the sense of anonymity for legal reasons, I won’t get real explicit.
Just know that MY knowing of these new charges absolutely validates my intelligent understanding of this situation. It has been so hard to see someone you have loved so much go through this in their life. I have asked repeatedly about his prognosis and it just really isn’t starting to look so great.
I am so sorry for him and for the way his life turned out. Truly.
One of America’s finest patriots. Always. I respect him to this day for his service. I always pray for him that he will stay out of harms way and not cause others any harm either. I always pray for him that his life will turn around some day and go right. But I have been told, repeatedly, that is not the way the story turns out with psychopaths.
I stayed and endured because I was brainwashed and gaslighted and love bombed into loving him. I was skillfully manipulated and if I had not turned it off, when I did, I believe he would have attempted to murder me worse than he did the first time he tried.
I hope to get over my agoraphobia some day. Maybe not.
I am old, it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s something “IT” said about me, to me…ugly and dreadful person. But he wasn’t always that way. He turned like a rabid dog, almost suddenly. NOW I know what insane people are like, live, up close and personal. I can’t imagine where I would be in my life, at this moment, had I stayed…
I think even LOVE has it’s limits; in fact, I know it does.
I had that cloud of mystification swirled around me like the cloak of a magician….”IT” called it the ‘spell’.
Thanks KatyDid for the vote of hope and confidence that it does go away after a while. I hope “IT” does too!
Dupey
My spath’s family may not have known the name for his nature, but they knew his nature. His father knew and over time gave signals to the girlfriends that his son was not a moral person to rely on or trust. His half brother called him a “liar”. His divorced parents made sure his son was provided for, his mother has him grow up in her home with the real mother, but do not allow him to be alone with the child. None of them could let go of the little sprankle of hope that one day he’d have a partner who would be strong enough to keep him out of trouble.
I don’t feel they ever lied to me. They sure hoped I’d be the one who could do what nobody will ever be able to do. But they also never praised him into the sky. On the contrary. They revealed some of the lies to me. When I wanted to verify some big strange story with them, I’d get the answer, “I don’t even wanna know about his stories. I don’t listen to them. It’s his own life.” Without directly telling me so, they seemed to be warning me, not to much credence in any of his stories. They always treated me with the greatest respect.
They had seen him so often failing at relationships, I’m sure they had enough experience that the gf had to find out by herself. That it would only isolate her from the few people in Nicaragua who knew him and would still help her out. They would not mention stuff of their own,, but when I brought things up believing it to be true, they would then reveal it was a lie. And if I was upset with him, they would reveal more of their true opinion of him.
I know that originally his father had invited me to stay at his home with my spath during my second summer in Nicaragua. Because I’ve been living so independently for so long by myself, and I never had met his father or brother personally before that, and I knew he and his dad clashed at times, I opted for a hostel room. I usually visited at the house without my spath. And as long as I asked to lend soundboxes to watch a DVD from the laptop or take the dog walking, they’d trusted me. They wouldn’t trust him. I once saw a clash with his father, both about his son as well as the cousin having played with his clutter lying about in the room. And it totally disgusted me. An ex-gf of him used to spend her lodging there and mentioned to me how abominable he was to his family. I realize that perhaps his father invited me with a polite excuse on account helping me save lodging money, but in reality wanted to have me witness his son’s unmasked behaviour to them. I think that if I had stayed there for a month and had witnessed his childish and abusive behaviour to his father more often, instead of just once, I would have left Nicaragua not ever wanting to see him again.
The only person who seems to cling on to hope more than the rest of the family is his cousin/sister. She grew up with him in the same house. She wasn’t nearly as confronted with his ill behaviour as much as his father was, because she lives in San Jose, Costa Rica. In a way she knew, but she still believed that as long as people helped him, gave him a home, gave him love, supported him that he one day would make a break in his life. She gave him housing for two months during our relationship. By then she was getting desperate, since he took her daughter’s IPod and pawned it to a guy for dope and lived there entirely on her costs. Then they rushed to Nicaragua for his father’s funeral and she was disgusted by him spending 1000$ of his inheritance in one night a couple nights after the funeral. But she had to return home for her work, and begged me to talk some sense into him, believing I could actually do that. Can’t even fault her that. I feel for her. I’m glad his father died never knowing how I ended up bein treated by his jerk of a son, died with a certain idea of peace. I know his half brother and his three children will turn alright and ignore him as much as they can.
It’s ok, athena. It’s not the first time someone mentioned my name as a bottled water brand. When I made the name, I was thinking about spiritual clarity and cleanliness. Like bright blue green water… I needed to focus on serenity, cuz I had none.
I’m more balanced now, I think. So, maybe it’s time to make a more normal name 😀
Shalom, Shalom. xxoo 🙂
Thanks. It hasn’t been easy severing off your right arm.
But I am making it. I have never been so heinously and so ugily betrayed like this in my life but I am starting to see it clearly, now, for what it really is. I have had some overpowering validation in the past 24 hours that has given me a completely different perspective. There is just no hope for “IT” anymore and since he can’t HELP HIMSELF when it comes to making people ‘targets’, usually the people he can CON into caring about him…”I” will just remove that temptation from him.
No amount of late night calling, from various phone numbers, whispering in the phone:
“Dupey, TALK TO ME!” No. There is no more of this in my life.
No more madness nor insanity.
I have been stalked the past 2-3 weeks and I still have not said one peep and I don’t intend to. The chaos and the drama stops here. Right now. Over and done. I believe that change is impossible with these horrid people.
They don’t deserve our love nor our attention, be the attention good or bad. It’s all the same to them: it’s attention. Sever the attention and you sever that cancer from your life. That is what I have found and learned.
“I” sound amazing, Shalom? 🙂 Thanks, Lovey but…
Nah, I am just a heartless B**CH – ask “IT’.
Big hugs to you, always,
Dupey
There is a lot of natural gas drilling going on in Pennsylvania and there have been no earthquakes there. Is that because that state is not on a fault line?
Louise, could be. I can’t remember which state it is up that way, maybe Penn?, that has outlawed fracking for the time being anyway.
They discovered a here-to-fore unknown little fault near the inclusion wells here in Arkansas near Damascus, about 10 miles from me as the crow flies, it was 4 km long, now it is 10 km long, but the inclusion wells where they dump the water are closed now. The water is being reprocessed somewhat or hauled to Oklahoma for putting in inclusion wells out there. The inclusion wells are 5,000 ft deep or more. There is a tremendous amount of eco damage done around here from the run off of the pads on which they do the drilling and our roads are decaying with the heavy (60,000 pound) trucks going up and down the road nose to tail like train cars, 24/7. I guess I should shut up the biatching, it provides jobs, but like everyone I say “NIMBY” (not in my back yard) At night the sky is lit up like a city scape, with the lights on the wells being drilled around me that I can’t really see during the day time, but at night they “glow in the dark.”
I wish they’d take their money and their jobs and go somewhere else, but my wishes aren’t gonna influence a single thing.
I guess I can treat the gas wells like the psychopaths, and I can move away from them….go NO CONTACT.
Louise,
Actually, there WAS an earthquake here in PA not more than a month or two back. It was the first one I’ve experienced outside of California; and in any case, it it was powerful enough to make my mattress vibrate and my lamps sway back an forth for half a minute!
Perhaps it was Mother Nature’s way of protesting the fracking operation here? – or maybe it had something to do with her disdain for Penn State Football?!
Oxy:
Yes, I am well aware of all the controversy with the natural gas drilling. Fracking hasn’t been outlawed in PA yet. I think it was on hold for awhile, but they are back at it again.
Constantine:
Wow, I don’t think I heard about the earthquake in PA recently! Hmmmm, that would make one wonder if it was related to the fracking as PA is normally not where earthquakes occur. I have experienced an earthquake twice and it wasn’t in CA. The first time I didn’t know what it was until I heard about it later on the news. The second time I still didn’t know immediately, but figured it out after about 30 seconds…it was stronger than the first. It can be scary.
UGGHH…don’t get me started on Penn State. What is your opinion on Paterno?
Constantine, I swear that Penn state thing makes my hackles rise on my neck! I think those witnesses that DID NOTHING should be PROSECUTED as accomplaces for all subsequent abuse that took place after they FAILED to report it to the police.
Right now the “church” where the pedophile Dickie Ray Chance preached is trying to “hush up” the arrest of Chance….and would cover it up like the Catholic church did if they could. I hope these victims OWN PENN STATE when it is over, and I hope the whole coaching staff and all the administration that failed these children go to prison and have BUBBA for a cell mate!
That little girl in NC what was deaf and had only one leg that was murdered by her step mother was seen to be abused by the neighbors and they SAID AND DID NOTHING. It cost the child her life.
We must, I repeat, WE MUST report and FOLLOW UP on suspected abuse. SUSPECTED abuse. The conspiracy of SILENCE is as bad as the abuse! Abuse couldn’t happen without it. I’m out of here tonight guys, got my blood pressure up just thinking about Penn State.