“You are all writing about instilling fear in others as a means to control them. But I was wondering about something:
How about your own fears? Do the people you are controlling never fight back? Would there be a way for them to scare you off? If there are even people killing themselves because of the bullying, wouldn’t it be more logical for them to seek revenge on you??
And you write somewhere most psychopaths have phobias.. I am trying really hard to understand…everyone says that psychopaths are fearless.. but then they have phobias and it somehow seems as thought they are afraid to lose control? And shying away from real confrontations?
And: what would happen if 2 psychopaths fight for the same thing?
I’m not sure if you’d want to answer those questions, because it might be like showing your vulnerable sides.. but I am just really curious and trying to get my head around it.”
Instilling fear in others is just one of several techniques. You will usually use more than one technique at the same time, not only fear – though in some cases it may be the most effective one.
Sometimes people will fight back, it will happen now and again because you just can’t always predict another person’s behavior in every detail, no matter how good a psychologist, how experienced and agile a manipulator, and how skilled a judge of character you are, because like all human beings you can’t always be as alert and effective as you might want to be. Usually a person may try to fight back in cases and situations where you have underestimated them, or when you’ve overlooked something that could not have been foreseen.
When it happens that somebody chooses to fight back, it doesn’t scare or frighten me. I believe I can speak for most psychopaths when I say that the prospect of retaliation, maybe even against my own life, is just not enough to make me feel afraid the way it does other, normal, people. Indeed, it may actually intrigue and excite me, though it will just as often be more likely to anger me – especially when we’re talking about a person I consider to be “a subject of mine”. The key word here is ‘mine’, because as I get to know somebody and gain control over them, I develop a sense of ownership, like you consider a family member, or maybe a dog, to be ‘yours’, to be something you own in a sense, and so it makes me very angry if someone attempts to break the bond of ownership – without my approval it’s an act of defiance, and anger is an emotion I feel much easier than fear is.
However, people rarely fight back, and the natural reason for this is that almost all psychopaths choose their victims very carefully and would never approach someone whom they sense might put up any serious fight. There are exceptions, of course, but they are the fewer.
The reason why psychopaths can seem unbeatable is that we have so much experience with what we do, we have been building a ‘knowledge database’ about human behavior and the mechanisms of psychological dynamics and have practiced and honed our expertise in using this knowledge effectively throughout our lives. This is what we are good at, this is what nature has build us to be predisposed for becoming good at.
If the psychopath’s inherent potential could be understood and his reality – the way he experiences life and everything he hears and sees happening around him – could be acknowledged as just as real as the way everybody else feels and think and see life, the unique talents could be put to use in a satisfying way for everybody, not just to the individual psychopath or just to society, but for the human species as such. And it would add to the variety of the human experience and thus the human potential, because it is all so very intrinsically connected. In a sense you can say I’m talking about a kind of ‘Holistic World View’ here.
Now to address your mentioning of Phobias… It is true I’ve mentioned that many psychopaths appear to have some kind of phobia, and irrational kind of fear that is hard to deal with because it is irrational, and which therefore can tend to hand on well into adulthood or even throughout the individual’s life. But it is important to remember that Phobias and Fears are not the same thing. When you experience fear you are afraid of something specific, something you can touch, feel, smell, or put into words and anticipate through logical deduction and/or experience.
A phobia can – in spite of everything – be approached, and it can be overcome, if the phobic individual is willing to do the work, but it is hard work and fewer rather than more people succeed eventually. But some psychopaths who have a phobia do beat it, and they are generally better suited to succeed due to their otherwise very low fear response and capacity for fear in general.
They’ll do what is needed to deal with their phobia, and – in my personal experience – they also tend to be more likely to try it than normal people are (provided we’re talking about a phobia that actually interferes with the person’s ability to function within the standard he sets for himself), and I believe this has to do with that fondness of control, of testing your boundaries, and even of testing how far you can push yourself in the face of a ‘terror’ that has no real name or origin that you can apply with name or place, and which psychopaths are so prone to have in excess.
From your choice of words I sense you may expect me to avoid this topic because I might feel some kind of shame at not being perfect or by admitting to having experienced something that was unsettling and uncontrollable (at the time, anyway). I can only tell you that I feel no such shame, nor do I feel less powerful for having admitted to not be made of titanium. The need to seem omnipotent and flawless is the element of some sociopathic people, but not for the psychopath.
If it seems like being strong means something to the psychopath, it is because him seeming to be strong means something to you. It is always about you, my subject, my target, my would-be-friend, my companion, my colleague, my lover; it is never, ever about me, the psychopath. Therein lies the main difference in how the normal majority of people and the psychopath function and place their focus and preference of focus
