I do not have the thrice-blessing of academe, and so my words are lesser to shit, anything I say is meaningless and if I were to say the sun is hot and grass is green, these would be words without import, for it is impossible for one of my lowly caste to Know. Only the PhD-havers may make the bold and exclusive claim to Knowledge.
So when I talk about sociopathy, this is entirely without having tithed away years of my earthly existence to the pedophiled halls of academe, I haven’t kissed sufficient rings nor blown any tenured geriatrics, and subsequently I haven’t earned the right to be considered capable of reading.
All this prostration to the altar of Knowers having been performed, I have spent some 15 years now in white collar and blue collar mines. I mean to say, I have had bosses. I have done my best to not have them, to avoid having them, to avoid them when I had to have them. I even –don’t laugh– tried to organize some workplaces. I even tried joining a union once, on my own. The union lady on the phone told me I should stop wanting to be in a union. The House Of Unions in my city was bulldozed a few years after that.
Something I noticed about bosses is that interactions with them are not good. You typically start a job and thereafter you perform it on a regular basis, and when you don’t see or hear from your boss, things are pretty sweet. For a warm season I worked as a security guard and I never met my boss after the job interview. I got calls from the shift supervisor who asked me if I wanted more hours, stand in for someone who fell ill, but I always said the same thing; can’t, already have something. And they didn’t press and it was a great life. Minimum wage, nearly no work.
My first job out of high school was with a supermarket chain HQ. I was to check the translations on lists of ingredients, alongside 5 women. I met the boss twice in my 2 months and 2 days there; once at the job interview, and once at the exit interview. I wonder what jobs the women I worked with have now, because they really loved the office. It gave me indigestion. Both interviews were ultimately unpleasant; the latter led to unemployment, the former to a bad job.
Every man destroys himself in the way of his choosing, and what I wanted to do was not destroy myself through bad jobs with bad bosses. Last year I taught ESL, very unpleasant and emotionally manipulative job that paid mediocre, but factoring in the hours actually spent preparing and moving between locations in the city, paid absolutely catastrophically. The interaction with the bosses was interesting in that the shift managers couldn’t put extra load on me without gaining consent, but they could TAKE hours from me. So I might plan out my expenses for April by March 30th, and then on April 2nd find out I will have a hundred euro less that month, because someone else is getting those hours. No recourse, unless I want to take on extra hours elsewhere. New group, substituting with groups you never met before and never will again, progress notes from the sick teacher typically out of date for the past month. More work, same or lesser pay for a completely uprooted schedule.
The red line going through all of this is that interactions with bosses and closely managed flunkies (by Graeber's taxonomy actually Type 1 taskmasters, but without the self-reporting) are unpleasant. I’m not satisfied with just the truism that “interacting with bosses sucks”. Something in the nature of bosses or the interactions between bosses and employees is fundamentally of a nature that causes unpleasantness.
Political Ponerology is a book written by a Polish guy who really disliked living in the Warsaw Pact and he didn't get to leave until very late. His thesis, as far as I could decipher it (note: he writes a little long-winded, which I can handle, but the version I have was published by something called “red pill press” and they pepper the text with notes of their own that read like verbatim 4chan posts) is that Stalin and much of USSR upper echelon leadership was sociopaths, xxx
Coming back to the early fight with academia, I don’t know what the current DSM considers sociopathy, it is impossible to know without being a Special Boy. I would like to try to create a coherent definition of the common use of the word. Empathy is something most people have access to, it’s the ability to approximately understand what other people feel like, maybe the basics of what they’re thinking, and then secondarily the ability to respond to that in a way that would generally be considered socially acceptable. Sociopaths are people who repeatedly don’t understand others feelings, nor respond to them in ways generally considered appropriate.
I think Lobaczewski has a point. His anticommunism should not be taken as a disqualifier; he’s describing the conditions he lived under. His experience and theory deserve critical consideration in readers’ own conditions. (I think he describes America as the next place where shit would pop off? I haven’t been able to finish maybe delete this note later) We should seriously interrogate people who control our own incomes and our alleged political rights and alleged political power, as to whether or not they’re sociopaths. I think the Goldwater rule should be retired out of concern for public health.
At least we should do the stare to them.
I believe we can construct a venn diagram. Big circle says “all people alive in the world” and inside it a 3-circle linked chain. The middle circle is “derives pleasure from causing suffering”. The left circle would be “capable of empathizing with suffering” and the right one “incapable of empathizing with suffering” and the overlap of 2 and 3 is where the danger lies, and doesn’t have any built-in mitigation mechanism. The left overlap is an interesting and difficult existence for those in it. It could be antisocial. I don’t really mean to score an atom-perfect exact lay definition of what a “sociopath” is but I think we can agree the people in the two right circles qualify as “assholes”. This is the basal component of the definition. I think if some one acts on these impulses and causes suffering, regardless of whether they derive pleasure or suffering from the action, should somehow be prevented from doing so
I was unable to make these lay definitions more exact. I think “generally socially acceptable” is as wishy-washy as it is load-bearing when society is divided into classes, and there’s very clear delineation between what each class thinks acceptable. To the working class, firing people, treating workers like shit, is all considered unacceptable. To the ruling class, people enriching themselves on the surplus value produced by others, these are considered perfectly acceptable.
One more problem with “socially acceptable” is that it is very specific to a time and place. Things considered acceptable here today, may be unacceptable elsewhere, at a different time. One important thing we have to reckon with is the idea of a market, and market forces, and “the invisible hand”. Otherwise rightfully condemnable behavior almost always has some sort of okaying possibility by grace of it e.g. preventing a worse thing, or that one wasn’t of sound mind when one did it, or some other excuse. The specific excuses considered okay are also historically specific. Between Socrates and Plato, there is a shift from whether it’s okay to jack up the prices on a horse if one bought it before a plague that killed all horses in town except this one. Socrates didn’t, but Plato thought this shit was A-OK. The prevalent position is a combination of on the one hand the market allowing you to do whatever you want, but on the flipside mandating you perform certain actions, and even if you were able not to, you should be preventing from not performing them. Any market economy has this function built-in but capitalism specifically, with people divorced from land, movable like chattel, allows for application of economic suffering and provides more powerful quasi-de-jure excuses for such cruelty.
A peasant in the 30-years-war might lose his livelihood to raiders, but this is understood to not have been lawful. You might lose your job, consequently the roof over your head, perhaps your life to “some kind of banking thing” or “the economy” and these may not be terms listed in the law but they certainly get trotted out as if “the laws of supply and demand” were real things. Police and military always side with landlords and support evictions even if the home remains empty afterward. On the market, a desire incapable of purchasing its satisfaction, will never be satisfied. A landlord can lower rent, or decline it altogether, but this ends their status as landlord and ends their income. They might still choose to do so, out of compassion. If they don’t, it is my contention that by a process of modus tollens, we can exclude the possibility that landlords feel compassion sufficient to prevent categorization as asshole, and by the lay definition, sociopath.
Employers also this way; the purpose of being an employer is to extract surplus value from the labor of employees. A sharper increased rate of exploitation than that of competitors both serves to aid in competitive battle, and in times of calm offers increased luxury spending to the employer. The employer could decline to increase the rate of exploitation. A co-op theoretically doesn’t have a rate of exploitation beyond democratically set amounts for business purposes. By the same modus tollens, an employer that doesn’t raise the wages of his employees out of compassion can be qualified as an asshole and sociopath.
It is worth noting that a business can go bankrupt. For landlords this is more difficult because real estate has no demand for variable capital (or very little compared to a real business). In both cases however value is being extracted from people; time is money and every hour on the job equals money that I may end up having to give the landlord under penalty of SWAT eviction. Both cases thus describe assholes operating within the same market, using the same medium of exchange. One can also add the government to this when taxes are used for things of no value to the taxed, such as politicians’ private villas by the sea.
The argument is this: in an enviroment that makes life easy for sociopaths, such as a market economy with elaborate excuses for cruelty, with sin-eating fetishes named "invisible hand" and "the economy" that can be blamed for any harm caused less directly than a knife to the chest, sociopaths thrive. Following Lobaczewski 4chan theory we can assert that sociopaths recognize and reinforce such enviroments, and regonize their own and groom them into their allegiance networks. The rest of humanity they treat any way they want to, and due to their setups, these ways are hideous to the eyes of any non-sociopath.
This is an aside, but this is also how you get an Epstein class. Hayden describes secret societies, that aren't necessarily hidden from the public eye, in Native American societies. Members wield power over others, are allowed transgressions that are punishable for non-members. The price is usually steep; all the money of a rich person, and lives of children. The details vary, but the price is never affordable to simple people, and completely unacceptable to people who want to lead more or less normal lives. I'm past the middle of the book and it's very long and he hasn't gotten to it but I heard at some point he suggests maybe the basic form of governance is exactly this kind of secret society, and maybe that's how things are run today. I suggest that one has to be a sociopath to join these societies, and their modern analogues. You have to be not just rich, which requires a certain amount of cunning or luck, but possess a true willingness to pay the price to be inducted into the halls of power.
In NatAm societies this piston tops out at being a respected or feared shaman that can kill with impunity so long as the correct mask is worn, but for capitalist society, with all the riches and options brought about by 150 years of petrocapitalism, excess are quite literally in the realm of the difficult to believe, both on the personal level with ranches and islands, (and the cruelty performed on them), but also on the systemic level where entire peoples, subcontinents are immisserated with a veneer of respectability. There is absolutely no way to construct any coherent morality around the existence of Jeff Bezos. He personally, directly and despotically wields control over the fates of more people than in all of Estonia. Indirectly surely a power more. He uses this power to jetset around on not one yacht, but a fleet of yachts, much like an L. Ron Hubbard.
I don't want to make a genocidal argument. I want a systemic one; ranks, deciding positions, if they have to exist, should be elected democratically within the groups that need a leader. There should be simple, undelayable immediate-recall procedures in case all else fails, but before that there should be checks to see if people are able to act like humans, at least pretending. That's all we can ask for, anyway. An enviromant that rewards non-sociopathic behavior will necessarily see sociopaths behave with feigned empathy, compassion, kindness. Such an enviroment is impossible in a market economy.