About psychopaths, bullies, and integrity
This is an entry from my journal. I comment on the psychosynthesis of the bully.
Reading the BBC’s article with the title How to spot a psychopath at work - from a man who worried he could be one made me think of my time at the European Parliament and of the human nature I have been so attentive to all this time. The world of politics does not have anywhere near as much money as bankers do, though it has formal power and enjoys great prestige. Those create in people certain expectations and thus amplify specific aspects of their personality that can be anti-social.
From the BBC:
“The city [meaning London’s finance sector] rewards this dark triad behaviour… being uber confident, being able to control and manipulate others, not getting emotionally involved in decisions and being decisive,” he said.
I think it actually comes down to a single core quality, which is the lack of integrity throughout. It has to be systematic. This is what makes a person manipulative. It also is where this “uber confidence” comes from, because it is the capacity to peddle lies knowingly. From the systematic lack of integrity also comes emotional detachment in terms of not caring about consequences. The manipulative person only serves their own interest. They exhibit no commitment to any statement or cause beyond their self: that is how they operate. As such, they necessarily have no commitment towards other people.
There are degrees, of course, though systematicity is necessary. At its extreme end the lack of integrity speaks of a character who will do anything to advance their agenda and take no accountability whatsoever for their actions. This is the person who will give you a warm hug, followed by a passionate kiss, and then a stab in the back. They will find what you need, give you enough of it or engender in you the hope that you will acquire it, and then instrumentalise that to control you. When you are of no service to them, they will betray you outright.
The lack of integrity is an anti-social trait even when the person is not as confident or decisive. Or, to put it differently, confidence and decisiveness do not make for an anti-social person. Those are actually the traits you want in a friend, for example, especially if they are combined with kindness. Granted, a master manipulator who shows confidence and is skilful is extra dangerous.
The insecurity of indeterminacy
In modelling the world, we abstract away the details to make sense of the underlying mechanics. In other words, we simplify. Consider a simple distribution of competences into three groups: low, medium, and high. Those at the lower and higher ends will typically be aware of their strengths or weaknesses and attendant placement in the distribution. The reason is that their cases are easier to notice. The person who is somewhere in the middle has a more challenging task to figure out where they are along the distribution. They could be a 4 but they could also be a 6 out of 10. There is more doubt there.
From awareness comes acceptance, which begets a sense of stability. Awareness for those in the middle, however, creates an immediate concern as it brings to the foreground this indeterminacy. They are effectively asked to resolve it, but they likely do not have the experience to do so. More so since this happens from an early age. As such, the person who finds themselves somewhere in the middle experiences, at least to an extent, insecurity. They can work to overcome it, but the point is that the insecurity is present.
Every person can find themselves in this situation. It is the intersection of awareness, inability to find answers with the given means, and concern about the implications. What does it mean to be somewhere in the middle? Indeterminacy is unsettling even in intellectual terms. We have a tendency to have an ending to our stories. Cliffhangers bother us. But why? I think it is due to said intersection.
From common insecurity to systematic belittlement
While feeling unsettled in the face of indeterminacy is common, there is an extra step before it forms the basis of a bully’s patterns of behaviour. The bully is the average person in the aforementioned distribution whose solution to indeterminacy is the belittlement of those who rank lower than they do.
A typical form of bullying that does not involve coercion is to make fun of someone who relative to the bully is less wealthy, less smart, less good looking, and so on. It always is directed towards those whom the person considers as inferior to their own and is systematic in its application.
The bully wants to invent or identify their inferiors, in whatever metric is expedient, and will shift the goalposts accordingly, in order to confirm in their conscience that they are not below average. They do so as a matter of first priority.
You can identify a bully in how they incorporate information about another person in the conversation they are having. They introduce this person and immediately say something about them which counts as a grave fault or irreparable frailty. For example, “I know Protesilaos: he is thoughtful, but he is poor”. Here the reference to one’s poverty is not relevant to the discussion and need not be stated at the outset. Yet it comes at the beginning to establish the baseline of expectations and thus to put the bully in a relatively superior position.
The bully is signalling a want for reassurance. They are asking to be told that what they have is worthwhile. It is not evil that drives them, but fear.
Watch out for this pattern and you will realise how common it is. Though it is not systematic in all those cases, otherwise everybody around us would qualify as a bully. Though pay close attention and you can spot the bully through the systematicity of this pattern.
Fear is not a weakness per se. It is response mechanism. It communicates a message. How we handle the fear is what speaks to our character.
The bully is effectively a coward. They are not only governed by fear but are also trying to externalise it and to weaponise it. They turn it into fuel for belittling others. They are cowards for not wanting to face their own insecurity and then to work towards resolving it.
Every person can reach a point of stability through acceptance. They have to be honest about their own condition and not seek to compare it to that of others in a positive or negative light. In other words, they need to be descriptive, without prescriptive undertones.
Cowards can appear confident. They will put up an act, where they are loud and boastful. By verbally or physically abusing others they will try to give the impression of toughness. More so if they can make a show out of it, to advertise to the world just how capable they are. They are, in effect, saying and doing it in the hope of tricking themselves into believing it. But they never do, otherwise the remedy for bullying would be bullying.
Punching down and kissing up
Their abuse will always be directed towards their perceived inferiors. To those whom they consider superior to them, even when they dare not admit as much, they will show a completely different face. They will be friendly, charming, and even exhibit a willingness for servitude. It will be exaggerated, as if something is not right about it. We thus use the expression “to punch down and to kiss up”.
Someone punching down is obviously a reason for caution. Though beware of the person who kisses up, for they always punch down.
Now an example from football to describe a bully in action. There was a guy in my neighbourhood who fancied himself as the strongest around. Me and friends of mine were athletes but we never made a big point about our fitness. One time we played a friendly match (i.e. off-season) where that guy was on the opposing team. We were outclassing them but were otherwise casual about it.
At some point a teammate of mine gets the ball off that guy with a clean challenge. He turns around, pushes my teammate, and then exclaims exactly this “you also are tough? I fuck you all in here” («είσαι και παλικάρι; εγώ σας γαμώ όλους εδώ μέσα»). My teammate responded calmly and we ignored him.
He then kept trying to hit us instead of playing the ball. At some point after tolerating his dirty game, I turn around, push him on the chest with force, and he falls to the ground. I get to his face while he is still confused and shout aggressively “what do you want, feeble-minded, what do you want?” («τι θέλεις, μαλακισμένε, τι θέλεις;»). After that he calmed down and nothing happened.
[ An aside about “feeble-minded”. In English this sounds intellectualist, but in Greek the word “malaka” (μαλάκα) and derivatives are very common. This is a variation of the word for soft and is used to describe someone or something that is soft in an undesirable way. Though malaka is used more casually to call a friend’s attention, so it is not negative in such a context. ]
Later he was prince charming to everybody and never again did he play against us. Maybe that event broke his propensity for bullying, so it served him well long-term. Or he found other ways to channel his resentment. But in the moment at least, he exhibited the behaviour of wanting to punch down to reassure himself that his self-image was correct, only to realise he should be kissing up instead, which he resorted to right after.
As for violence, it is neither good nor bad. Those who glorify, demonise, ignore, or underestimate it will be its victims. Same with everything in a world of admixture, as I have explained at length many times before. One must be prepared. It is a matter of how it is used: the application and the degree will make it abusive or not. Controlled use can be benign. It is how a safe space is established, after all.
Advantage at the personal level
Bullies will not be as obvious, however. They may wear nice clothes, look wonderful, and talk in polite ways with all the trappings of etiquette. You can still spot them by paying attention to their patterns of speech, where they keep alluding to specific people whom they in fact loath for their perceived inferiority, even though they are not relevant to the topic at hand.
Furthermore, these subtle bullies will default to devaluing what you do or represent. They operate by shifting the goalposts. One way to achieve that result is to state something vague, which can then be redefined willy-nilly. More so if this gives them an immediate advantage over you.
For example, “Protesilaos is a poet; poetry is lame”. By dismissing or trivialising what you do/are they are again setting the baseline in a manner that is advantageous to them. What does it even mean for poetry as such to be lame? And what even is the problem with that, anyway? As soon as you pause to work within their framework, you are playing their game.
If you ask for them to elaborate on what exactly they have in mind, they will refrain from doing so. They will instead claim to have made a mistake or tell you how this does not matter after all. Remember systematicity though. A genuine mistake is fine, but they will keep showing this behaviour over and over again. They seek that advantage at the personal level, to make you think that there is something to it after all, which is the key here.
Disapproval is not bullying per se. It can be done with rigour, in the form of an analysis, to explain how or why something is undesirable in general. But in the bully’s case, there is no rigour, no depth, no analysis that applies beyond their immediate want. It consists in name-calling like “this is lame”, which itself is malleable to always fit the rules of the game that the bully chooses to initiate.
For example, I am against clickbait tactics. It is one of the reasons I produce long-form content and why I avoid knee-jerk reactions. My rationale is that clickbait forces things to be superficial, which in turn reinforces the worst traits in people, which is turn destroys nuance, which in turn makes us less thoughtful, which begets anger, frustration, and conflict.
Mine is a case of judgement, of understanding the state of affairs, and of thinking through the implications of any given position. In so doing, I am not seeking an advantage against any specific person because I am not shifing the goalposts. I go to great lengths to explain what I mean exactly so that the goalposts cannot be shifted. Thus I stand by what I claim and am eager to comment on it further.
Pay attention to the goal, which is control at the personal level. Look for the tendency to divert attention, to say something flagrant only to take it back immediately. As always, this has to be done systematically. A one-off, for whatever reason that may be, is a false positive.
Common tricks of emotional manipulation
Which brings me to the experience of life in the world of day-to-day politics. As I noted above, politics does not have the money that goes around in financial circles. Though it has power and prestige ex officio. Those can and do encourage people to adopt anti-social patterns of behaviour.
Based on what I observed, politicians are less likely to be bullies. In the aforementioned simplified model, they are the achievers who do not feel the need to prove that they are achieving something. There may still be those among them who have great ambition coupled with deep-seated insecurity, though the average parliamentarian is fine in this regard.
Where we find lots of bullies are in the assistants to the politicians and in the wider world of civil society, else lobbying. Those are the functionaries who are close to power but are not powerful themselves. They need to remind everybody of their acumen, their academic credentials, the money they earn, the connections they have, and so on. This is where we begin to discern the propensity to single out the ostensibly inferior people at times where that is unwarranted.
In pointing towards their inferiors at the earliest opportunity, those bullies will use names and have some actual person in mind. For example, they will not talk about poverty in broad terms as a systemic phenomenon, but only as it is expressed through the vices of a given figure that they know. And then their talk about poverty is not for the sake of doing something about it, but only to then juxtapose it with their own state of being.
Bullies are the situational psychopaths. If they think they can get away with abuse, they will employ it, like the tough guy I covered above. Except in politics they will do it while also professing their undying devotion to some lofty standard of morality.
European politics is especially suspect in this regard, because in Europe many decision-makers live in a fantasy land where they believe to have a sophisticated civilisation while the rest of the world is backward-minded. No, I am not referring to some extremist ideology, but to the run-of-the-mill Europeanist and milquetoast centrist. Whereas, say, politicians in Cyprus know that Cyprus is a small country with little influence on international affairs.
This, too, by the way, is the figment of the bully’s mind: to depict other cultures as inherently inferior, in order to prop up what they have.
If outright abuse is not an option, bullies will operate with guile. Emotional manipulation thus unfolds. One such trick is through instilling in you a sense of guilt. It is most effectively when you cannot change what they are pointing towards or you have to do something extremely demanding to remedy the situation.
By telling you how something unchangeable you have is undesirable, they pressure you to accept your inferiority. Once you internalise that thought, they no longer appear to you as bullies but as normal people who have an apparent concern for your wellness; so normal that you may even think they are benevolent.
Racism is the most common form of induced guilt, even though we can think of it in different dimensions as well. Its goal is to make the person feel bad about their innate characteristics, like their skin colour, facial features, and cultural background. Racism is inducing guilt because if it succeeds in convincing its targets to internalise its message, then the oppressive superstructure it conceals is no longer seen as oppressive in the eyes of the oppressed, but as the ordinary form of social organisation.
Guilt from the outside exploits a person’s desire to fit in. It also feeds off a person’s want to excel at what they do. Such a person will thus internalise the message more easily and then use it as the basis for their own self-criticism. It is no coincidence that many people will be racist against their own people, for example, or immigrants will have strong anti-immigrant views. They have internalised racism as the objectivity of things.
Another common trick of emotional manipulation is mixed signalling. Its goal is to create uncertainty, much like the shifting of the goalposts, which eventually makes you rationalise your doubts as your own shortcomings. That makes you vulnerable and open to being controlled.
Mixed signalling happens in many interpersonal affairs. A common one is in what can appear as on and off romance. It consists in a needless gentle touch that is accompanied by suggestive language that seem to appear all of a sudden. It then turns into an expression of distance and apparent professionalism. The objective is to create a hope and an expectation through which the person becomes controllable. The giving and the taking away is a kind of entrapment.
There are other tricks, such as denying any wrongdoing or making you doubt your own recollection of events. Fishing for compliments, asking for validation, making tacit threats. Though those are easy to catch and thus not very effective in isolation.
Badmouthing someone is also very common. Though this one is not directed towards you. It is a form of conspiracy: to make others turn against you. But you yourself are not effectively caught in the trap of committing self-harm, so you can notice how you are being the victim in such a situation.
Integrity as a strength and a weakness
I entered the world of politics as an outsider. I got invited to work for a politician who was reading my blog and who thought I would be of use in their office. I did not have any connections, was not a member of some party or organisation, did not partake in activism, and was generally doing exactly what I do now: write with clarity.
I think I did well in all my office tasks, such as to write internal analyses about a political situation, to table amendments to legislation, and to contribute to relevant research. Those are not interpersonal skills. Quotidian politics is more like gossip than philosophising. You have to connect with people, to give them something in exchange for something else, and to always maintain that web of dependencies.
Whereas I am a one-man army who will not try to depend on anybody and who will do my own thing at all times. I quickly realised this made me unfit for the world of politics. Fundamentally, I am too honest and too loyal, and probably too capable for my own good.
This is a blessing and a course. On the positive side, it makes me speak my mind in earnest using tools I have developed carefully and which I continue to sharpen (e.g. this article). I am not trying to mislead anybody. I will take the time to expound on my thoughts because (i) this is how I can understand them better and (ii) I may filter out the kind of person who is not willing to engage with my work in depth.
By filtering out those people I effectively guarantee that I myself will not fall into the trap of appealing to an audience for the sake of gaining some material advantage. I am not here to make friends. If that happens, it is a happy coincidence. I am here to express what I am working on. I enjoy the process.
It is also why I do not keep track of any analytics on my website and why I do not share my publications on social media or Reddit. I do not want to be influenced by external factors. Same for doing videos only when I feel like it, without tricks and gimmicks. These are my genuine thoughts, which I have considered carefully, and which I pronounce responsibly to the best of my abilities. It is why I do it in public with my real name as well.
I want to communicate in earnest because this is what motivates me. It is how I became a philosopher, after all, given no formal background in the field. I am interested in depth of understanding and will entertain every idea seriously without rejecting it at the outset. Whatever I do, I do it carefully, giving to it my undivided attention, out of a sense of wanting to identify in it the qualities it has beyond what it renders apparent.
This, however, means that I am prone to emotional manipulation. Or, at least, I used to be before figuring it out and paying closer attention to it. You would show me a friendly face and I would be willing to run through a brick wall to defend our friendship. So if you were fooling me, you were already making me do something that I would not have done under different circumstances.
It is not the same as a people-pleaser. Such is the person who will adapt to their social milieu like a chameleon. They are not doing it maliciously: they just want to fit in. Whereas I am fine in being a misfit if it means that I remain honest, hence the one-man army attitude I have. My case is about being loyal and expecting reciprocity. It is the expectation that would fail me. As such, my loyalty would be expressed as a kind of naivety, else foolishness.
You are a fool if you are expecting friendship in the world of politics (and the same for any environment where people can advance their career by throwing you under the bus). You might make friends, because there still are kind people working there, though if your disposition is towards loyalty then you will quickly be taken advantage of.
The weakness I had is also not the same as being a pushover. I am effectively the opposite of that because I do not budge from my position for the sake of sociability or amiability. I only change my mind in the face of compelling arguments brought forth by another or discovered through further personal inquiry. Granted, if it is something I do not care about, I will not argue for it.
You know them from when they are young
These are identifiable in people from an early age. You will find them in personal dynamics at school, for instance. I never was the super popular kid, for example, because I am not handsome and charming. But I was always well received within each niche I occupied: such as sport and motorcycles.
I was the defiant boy you find cool exactly because your parents and teachers are not allowing to be as wild as he is. But you still do not see at especially appealing. Being at the periphery was fine as I was doing my own thing with such dedication that you could not make fun of it: others would call you out for being silly. Whereas being at the periphery while trying to do what the popular kid does will make you look desperate.
Change the details and you realise that the same is happening today. I frequently get feedback along the lines of how inspiring I am to someone. I understand it at the rational level, though I cannot feel it because to me this is my normal state of affairs. I keep being myself then and hope for the best.
Some people, well men to be precise because only men are curious about this specific topic, even want to live my lifestyle and ask me for tips. That is the part that your upbringing forbid you from approaching: the untamed expression to do what you want because you have concluded that it is right for you to proceed thus.
What I do is not especially challenging in technical terms. Though it requires steel at the emotional level. You have to set your expectations accordingly and be patient throughout.
To my mind, I am average in terms of strength and skill. Where I excel is in the robustness of my character combined with the capacity to dive deep into something.
To live the way I do, you have to accept that you are not involved in whatever the centre of attention is. Put differently, you embrace irrelevance. You liberate yourself from the want for relevance and in so doing you free up your energy, which you may then direct towards whatever little thing you are interested in, such as to write.
This naturally means that you will probably be alone as well, but that you would be experiencing already if you were doing it. Last year I earned close to 13k EUR, while the minimum wage is 1k EUR. You do not actually want to live like me. If you like what I do, it is that same sense of admiration you have for tribes in the rainforest while you live in some apartment downtown.
You cannot relate and are underestimating how you need to build up the capacity for frugality if you have been raised in an environment of abundance. In effect, you have to rewild yourself, which takes time and effort. Though, yes, anybody can do it, male or female: it is how people used to live for millenia until very recently.
My life is not harsh in material terms. It is austere, yes, but I am not suffering. In effect, I have turned “less is more” into a lifestyle.
The failure of schooling
Which brings me to the point of education. At school, students learn plenty of tangentially useful technical details through memorisation. Those are designed to make them “book smart”, else to create in them a misplaced confidence in textbook versions of the given field of inquiry. They are not interested in cultivating a sense of “street smart” because that is how you begin to think critically about matters beyond the narrow confines of your specialisation.
If anything, knowing about emotional manipulation would help with friendship, dating, marriage, and parenting, which is potentially beneficial to practically everyone. You will be better prepared to spot the early signs of a bully and choose to avoid them while you can. In so doing, you will be giving negative reinforcement to the bully, to not resort to their usual tricks, which can be a benign corrective for them long-term.
Actual psychopaths are a different kettle of fish, however. Schooling will not change them. Though it will prepare others for what they are capable of. In most cases, what we consider a psycho actually is a bully in a certain situation, as I have described herein.