Good Evening Friends,

We are talking about sociopaths, as distinct from the "pyschopathic" serial killer or otherwise supposedly "rational" career criminal. Remember, we have established that the sociopath, as we have defined the term is a person who will move from a position of law-abiding citizenship into the domain of crime, only as a means to an end not an end in itself. But for our purposes, sociopaths are not insane in the usual sense of the word.

Let me briefly address the question of the sociopath's "lack of conscience," in that they do not feel the love, family warmth, loyalty, and friendship, etc, that they are "supposed" to feel. This supposed lack therefore somehow allows them to commit horrific acts of violence against their family members.

Let me refer back to a central ontological principle of Existentialism/Buddhism, as I understand it: consciousness is not what it is but what it is not. Consciousness, therefore, cannot apprehend itself as an object. The "mind" is a fluid thing.

It is not possible to maintain a feeling, emotion, or mental state indefinitely or even as long as we would like no matter how hard we try. This principle also makes us aware, as we have discussed before, that there are times when we don't even think with our own minds and feel with our own hearts.

Remember we examined an episode of the original CSI: crime scene investigation unit crime drama with lead investigator Grishom. We looked at the show involving a young woman of average size who got engaged to a young man who was abnormally short, a "dwarf," was the unfortunate term used.

We talked about how the woman admitted to herself the attraction she felt for the young man, despite implicit societal prohibition. We also speculated that perhaps she was not exactly aware of the nature of her attraction to the young man.

We made the counterintuitive point that she had, in fact, harbored a physical/sexual attraction for men of that type, shorter than herself - and indeed, the shorter the better, and this despite the societal message that she was to desire someone "tall, dark, and handsome," in this case, emphasis on the "tall" (taller than herself, as is fairly typical of the phenotypical relationship of men-women couples).

This is a naturalistic existential view, as I understand it, applied to this situation. We raised the possibility that the young woman may have told herself things like: "I fell in love with him despite his appearance," or "I looked past his appearance," and so forth.

We rejected such sentimentality as inherently insulting to the young man in question. I don't know if I made this clear before, but if she had attributed such altruistic motives to herself just before entering the marriage, then there is two contradictory motives at work: 1) she rejected the societal message about what kind of man she was supposed to marry and made her own decision, making her choice existential in nature (ethically speaking); 2) she had fallen prey to the standard, conventional, societal but wrong analysis of her own motives in marrying her young man, namely because of her "good heart."

Attraction is both physical and mental, a package deal. We do not fall in love with disembodied spirits. We fall in love with bodies perhaps containing "spirits" or "souls." Our preferences do not always conform to the Greek-inspired ideal.

If she did not have such an altruistic self-conception of her own motives in the beginning, she might well become "infected" with them through peer pressure, as we discussed. People constantly telling her how "good-hearted" she must be to marry a "dwarf." The fact that she is completely turned on by this type of guy might get lost or distorted. And in time she may come to think of herself as having extended a kind of charity to her young man by marrying him - in time, the process would be very subtle and slow-acting, I would think.

This "infection" would change her in a subtle but concrete way. It would substantially change the way she interacted with her husband, even if they could not identify the cause. The weight of everyone else's wrong analysis and opinion of your actions can "infect" you like a virus. An outer invasion of your own motivation matrix, as I once put it. In this way, you, in a sense, do not know where you end and the rest of the world begins.

Not knowing where you end and the rest of the world begins.

You will recall that I offered this as a possible explanation of why so very many Hollywood/celebrity marriage end up in shambles. It is the weight of living life in a fishbowl, constantly in the public eye. Why should this be so? Because, as we have indicated previously, observation is not just a passive activity. Observing phenomena changes it.

The weight of societal opinion can make you think and feel things, to a certain extent, things you, yourself, naturally and organically, think and feel. Conversely, the weight of societal opinion can make us "forget" (not using the word precisely) or not feel and think things that you actually do think and feel. The power of suggestion is at work, to put it crudely.

I was going to skip this but let me analogize the matter this way. Donovan's Brain was a 1930s radio play starring Orson Welles which was based on a novel by Curt Siodmak. Dr. Patrick Cory was a scientist obsessed with keeping a disembodied brain alive. He did several experiments that failed.

But finally fate intervened to show him where he had erred. William H. Donovan was one of the victims of a plane crash nearby and the county physician appeals to Dr. Cory to help. You see, one of the victims, namely William H. Donovan, is still alive, and he can perhaps be kept that way if they operate immediately.

At this point Cory has what Oprah Winfrey used to call a "light bulb moment." The monkey had been dead when he had extracted its brain and tried to keep it alive. This is a mistake he doesn't intend to make again!

Yada, yada, yada, and he extracts the brain and successfully keeps it alive. In fact he is so successfully at keeping Donovan's Brain alive, that the brain grows and mutates (aided by Cory's methods which he used to experience more clear, direct communication with the brain) and develops impressive psychic powers.

Through the faculty of telepathy Donovan communicated with Dr. Cory and told the scientist things about his past life. The communication became so complete that Cory started smoking cigarettes - the same brand as Donovan! Cory started using an expression of Donovan's: "Sure, sure, sure." Dr. Cory was roused from a hypnotic trance in which he was found to be writing Donovan's name over and over again - with his left hand just like William H. Donovan.

The brain was eventually able to establish utter physical control of Dr. Cory for limited periods of time. He made Dr. Cory committ his wife to an insane asylum to get her out of the way because she was asking uncomfortable questions - and made her forget this. Cory committed his wife to an insane asylum and forgot that he'd done it because the brain made him forget.

When Cory's friend, another medical doctor, and his son, ask him about the whereabouts of his wife, he says, honestly that he doesn't know. Cory thinks that she just walked out on him. The other doctor, beginning to suspect that Patrick had something to do with her disappearance says that since the brain communicates with him, tells him things about his life, mightn't the brain also be able to make him forget things.

This is the dynamic I am describing. The weight of societal opinion can make us think and feel, falsely, and cause us to "forget" or suppress our own individual, organic thoughts and feelings.

More next time,

wingedcentaur