Ialdabaoth
Posts: 1073
Joined: 5/4/2008
From: Tempe, AZ
Status: offline
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I will now try to distill my view on this down:
1. Many people have had bad experiences in their lives, for various (and generally personally valid) reasons. It's bad form to belittle these bad experiences; we've all experienced pain, and we all know what it's like when memories are still fresh and raw and bleeding with emotion.
2. Many people feel very, very strongly about these experiences, for various (and generally personally valid) reasons. It is natural to want to express these experiences to others.
3. Many people feel that the overwhelming intensity of their experiences cannot be expressed, except through words that share that level of intensity. When someone has been hurt - and hurt badly - it is natural to villainize the source of the pain, to a level proportional to the intensity of the pain itself. And some people feel things (including pain) very intensely, which is generally what makes them desirable and worthy companions in the first place.
4. Thus, it is natural to turn to words like "sociopath", or "pedophile", or "witch", because how else could I have been hurt so badly? And often, it even makes sense - she completely ignored my feelings, so she must be incapable of understanding feelings. He lied to me, so he must be a consummate liar. He manipulated me - me! - so he must be a master manipulator.
But! As natural as these tendencies are, they're often dangerous. They lock us into one narrow way of seeing our past, and prevent us from alternate, and potentially more useful interpretations. No one is an expert on their own memories. Especially when emotions get involved, it is impossible to evoke an accurate account of one's past. That's part of the purpose of emotions - to color and distort memory, so that we encode it into fast, responsive "lessons", instead of being paralyzed with indecision every time we see a lion. It's evolutionary biology: being terrified of lions makes you react faster to them when you see one. Similarly, being terrified of human predators, hopefully, makes you react faster to them when you see one. The problem with human predators is that they are far more clever than lions, and can exploit the very cognitive tricks that were designed to deal with predation.
The point being made, here, is that concepts like "sociopath" (and "pedophile" and "witch" and what-have-you) have rather narrow useful definitions, and a huge no-man's-land of "gray area" around them. And the "gray area" is so vast, that when you throw the labels around, you're far more likely to wind up in the no-man's-land than to arrive at an actually useful set of conclusions.
"I feel manipulated, and it really, really hurt. It feels like he always played everyone."
"I feel lied to, and I feel like he lied to others, and now I have so much trouble trusting anything anyone says."
"I feel treated like an object. I feel violated, like my consent was never considered."
All of these things are unequivocally true statements, describing someone's experiences. They are very useful for communicating to others how you feel, and they're even useful for communicating to yourself exactly what's going on inside you. Sometimes it helps to hear yourself say these things.
"He's a master manipulator; he manipulates everyone."
"He lies so much, he can't tell the difference between the truth and a lie."
"He has no concept that anyone but himself is a person."
All of these things are very colorful, emotional interpretation of those same experiences. They lock you into one narrow view of reality, and constrain you to a thin slice of possible solutions.
Yes, there are actual sociopaths out there. But most people aren't hollow, soulless monsters - they're just emotionally clumsy, short-sighted, and terrified that they'll be taken advantage of, or terrified that their needs won't get met. So they do stupid things, and they hurt each other, and they hurt themselves. And it's very, very sad to watch. But then we get convinced that they're monsters, because we're also emotionally clumsy, and short-sighted, and terrified that we'll be taken advantage of, or that our needs won't get met. So we do stupid things, and we hurt each other, and we hurt ourselves. And we propagate the cycle. And we forget to ask: "is calling this girl a sociopath expanding my options more than it's limiting them?" - because ultimately, it doesn't matter what someone "is"; it only matters how we react to, and grow from, our experiences. We can obsess over others or we can learn something about ourselves.
The wheel of samsara needs hands to crank it. We can let go if we wish.
< Message edited by Ialdabaoth -- 4/28/2009 11:45:35 AM >
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RE: The dangers of a sociopath dominant - 
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