53. Societies Evolve to Normalize Psychopathic Self-Presentation 🔗

Observation: psychopaths are often charming/reassuring and can put you at ease in a trusting, vulnerable state.

Hypothesis A: Psychopaths learn to fake norms of trustworthiness and reassurance

Hypothesis B: Societies evolve to normalize psychopath behaviors as norms for all

B is very intriguing. What if all is non-psychos pick up highly manipulative behaviors as “polite and considerate” behavior via imitation of powerful psychopaths? And so all societies have psychopathic cultures of manners as their UX?

Many of the actual kindest and most trustworthy people I know are ill-mannered. Not in the sense of being pointlessly rude or sadistic, but rough, uncouth, and ill-at-ease even in their own milieus. They can’t put others at ease.

Entertaining thoughts is fun. I guess why they call it entertaining. Building on that maybe I should host a party for thoughts, serve them alcohol (which I’d have to drink of course since they live in my head)

Okay, just thought up a pretty robust case for B that this margin is too small to contain. I’m upgrading it to working hypothesis.

Logging interesting exchange with @aresnick tweet^[1]

Obv this is a subtweet thread of shit going on I can’t share publicly.

My entire writing career is an extended subtweet. My memoirs should be titled “Subtweeting the Universe”

Yep. Adverse selection ftw. tweet^[2]

Trying on 2 summary aphoristic versions of the hypotheses for size

A: Sufficiently advanced psychopathy/sociopathy is indistinguishable from good manners

B: Civilization is the process of turning sociopathy into good manners

B strikes me as more true

Oh shit just realized @kimballscott 2x2 fits right into this theory. Ruinous empathy and manipulative insincerity are right next to each other and if you can’t tell real/fake “care personally” apart, they’ll look the same to you.

If you have low self-awareness you won’t be able to tell them apart even on yourself, and mistake your own manipulative insincerity for empathy. In the zone in between it may be ruinous for others but advantageous for you.

This is a tempting conclusion to draw but us actually survivorship bias. If you don’t actually successfully resist a manipulation attempt you might never realize it. This is one way redpilling works: revealing your manipulated condition to yourself. tweet^[3]

Subconscious = known unknown (“something is wrong here/spider sense tingling”)

Unconscious = you register the data necessary to draw the right conscious conclusion but don’t actually do so, and might never do so. Doesn’t need repression. Just failure to think it through.