A Reader Asks:
Do you have friends? Friends that you wouldn’t screw over at the drop of a hat?
Thanks
Yes, I have friends. I have a lot of friends, unless by friends you mean people I am truly close to and who know me for who I “really” am. Of those I have very few, and only two of them are what I would call friends, even though I’m not sure that normal people would agree. – Before I can answer your second question truthfully I have to establish – if I can – what you imply with the word ‘friends’.
If you mean to ask me if I have friends I would go through years of endless torture and then die miserably for so that they might live, the answer will have to be no. I do not have any people or things or situations that I would do this for.
If you mean friends that I wouldn’t screw over under any circumstances whatsoever, for as long as my life and health is not at stake, I’d say I haven’t experienced it, but I can imagine it happening.
I have met a few people over the years… I’d say two in total… whom I respect and care about to an extent that makes me unwilling to screw them over even if not doing so means I’ll have to go through a certain amount of “stress”. Stress, to me, usually means being inhibited in my freedom to achieve gratification to an acceptable degree, meaning it may not be optimal gratification, but it have to at least allow me to live through another day before a frustration I cannot handle sets in.
It may surprise some to hear that I have experienced this not only with two individual people that I have known, but also with a few things, activities and situations.
When I evaluate, I do not distinguish between people, animals, things and events. To me, because I’m a psychopathic personality, there is in principle no fundamental difference between how I emotionally and cognitively relate to people, things, animals, experiences, activities, etc.. Everything in my reality is evaluated by the measuring standard that is decided by the degree of well being, of gratification, that I can derive from interacting, handling, viewing, observing, tasting, hearing, and otherwise dealing with, any given object or phenomenon.
To the neurotypical person there are clear qualitative different types of values between different kinds of phenomena. And due to the qualitative difference in value, certain types of phenomena can never be traded with certain other types of phenomena, even if the elements they each are made of are the same. This is so no matter how crucial it may be for the individual’s well being that such a trade takes place.
The obvious example is with human beings, especially small children, and any other so called inanimate object. The air we breath has oxygen in it. A human child has oxygen in it’s blood stream, it’s lungs, it’s brain, etc. The oxygen is oxygen in both the child and the air. But to most people a human child is of higher value than all other things out of principle, and if a choice has to be made everything else, no matter how valuable or how crucial to the person who is given the choice, will always be traded in favor of the child.
But I have no such principle of value. All phenomena are inter-changeable according to circumstance and personal preference in time.
To me a human child is a human child, sure, but it is also tissue, fluid – f.x. blood and urine, etc. – and it is potential gratification in any number of ways. F.x., if I succeed in creating a lasting and mutually gratifying relationship with a special person, and this person values a human child like most people value human children, then the well being of any human child will be given a very high degree of value by me because making someone happy who make me happy if they’re happy is worth most anything, because it is in this I find the greatest level of gratification for myself.
So yes, I have, and I can have, friends I won’t screw over at the drop of a hair. But it is an illusion when it looks as if I take this position for their sake.
I am also especially lucky in that I have friends, and one particular person who is becoming something that far exceeds the concept of just a friend, who care for me – not in spite of my emotionally and cognitively different relationship with value and evaluation, but because they understand that my values aren’t lower then other people’s, they are just measured by a differently structured system of evaluation.
