Narcissists Who Are Also Psychopaths: The Dark Triad - Know Anybody Like This?

 

I was watching a video on YouTube about regional accents in the US and when it was over, a video on narcissism  showed up.  Eight questions a narcissist can't answer.  (They all involved having to admit some sort of personal weakness or listening to another person.)  Then this one was next:

Essentially, this therapist says it's impossible to work with psychopaths and he doesn't.  

And that's why nobody except complete toadies who shower Trump with praise and adoration manage to have any longevity in his administration.  This explains his relentless fight to overturn the election and his ignoring of norms and laws.  

It doesn't explain his followers.  Well, I can understand other psychopaths supporting someone who supports their horribly anti-social behavior, but we can't have that many psychopaths in this country.  

There wasn't any discussion of what happens when two psychopaths get together.  Do they bond?  Or do the quickly fight for dominance? 

Sure, the word narcissist has been used to explain Trump since early on.  Some have even used the word psychopath.  But now that we've seen Trump non-stop for four years, this description seems spot on to me.  

So, There's This Virus. It Needs A Human Host. If It Can't Find One It Dies.

There's been lots written about how the virus spreads.  And as I started writing this post, I googled questions to make sure I was right.  But I couldn't figure out the questions that would lead to the kind of answers I was looking for. (Not ones that supported my beliefs, but ones that factual detailed how the virus spreads.)  Most of the posts about how the virus spreads are dated March or April of this year.  Others have no date whatsoever.   This was the closest I could find and is dated September 18.  It's from the CDC:

"The virus that causes COVID-19 is thought to spread mainly from person to person, mainly through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, or talks. These droplets can land in the mouths or noses of people who are nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs. Spread is more likely when people are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet)."

 

The point I'm trying to make is this:

• Humans are the host for the COVID-19 virus.
• If the virus can't get to another host (another human) from the original host, the virus can't spread.
• People (whether they know they host the virus or not) can prevent the virus from spreading to another human by:
• Staying home alone until the virus is out of their system (until they are better, basically)
• If they must have contact with other people:
• Not broadcasting droplets or aerosol sprays containing the virus (by breathing, talking, coughing, singing, etc.)  on or near other human beings 
• People around them wear protective gear - masks minimally, and for first responders, other appropriate protective gear.
• The infected person wears a mask

If the virus can't find a new host, it dies.  If all infected people prevent the virus from finding another host, the pandemic will end.  It's that easy.  It might take a month or two for most of the viruses to die because of lack of a new host.  

Instead, fear about the economy caused many politicians to open places where spreading happens.  Many politicians refused to require masks. Or wear one themselves. The economy would take a hit if things were shut down for two months.  But then it could open.  Fear of the virus is keeping the economy down as much as, if not more, than government restrictions on businesses.

That doesn't mean, after we starve most of the viruses out there, everything will be perfect.  There will be people in whom the virus keeps thriving longer than normal.  There will be people traveling from other places carrying the virus.  But just wearing masks would radically slow down the spread of the virus.  

Instead the virus is finding millions of hosts.  Why?

• Lack of understanding these basics.
• Lack of concern for other people. ("I'm young, it won't hurt me if I get it.")
• Lack of self-discipline. (People who need to go to weddings or bars before this is over.)
• Underlying personal issues individual humans have that make them defy the obvious. ("Wearing a mask infringes on my freedom.")
• Mixed messages from science on one side and religious leaders and the Trump cult on the other side

That's all.  It's not that hard to understand.  

Some Links to Reading On Immunology, Epithets, And Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Miller

1.  Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die

This article by Ed Yong at The Atlantic emphasizes the point that Immunology is complicated.  Then goes into what happens when COVID-19 gets into the system.  The first line of defense and then the second line.  Then talks about how these complications make it hard to figure out who will be able to brush off the virus relatively easily, why we aren't sure if people can get it a second time,  and who might get really sick.  

2.   Scientists May Be Using the Wrong Cells to Study Covid-19

How did an African green monkey that died in 1962 get involved in the biggest research debacle of this pandemic?

Helps explain why there were a few initial studies that said hydroxychloroquine was effective against the COVID-19 virus.  

3.  On a different topic, here's a post that examines the psychology of insults in the age of Trumpsults.

"I shall call these the “Foul Four” because the researchers showed words conveying negative evaluations exemplify four themes. Those themes are worthlessness, stupidity, depravity and peculiarity."

 

4.  KEEPING UP WITH THE MILLERS: STEPHEN MILLER AND HIS WIFE, KATIE, FOUND LOVE IN A HATEFUL PLACE

The mind of evil is hard for most of us to fathom.  Michael Cohen says that's one reason to read his new book Disloyal.  Well here's another look at the lives of evil - Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Miller - in Vanity Fair.  It reminds us that in a United States that works, people like this are sidelined, but just waiting for the opportunity to take power.  I guess I should qualify "United States that works" to mean for white citizens since the supremacist hatred of Miller was alive and well in the Southern United States, legally, until not that long ago, and symbolically in the many confederate statues that are still all over.  

According to this February 2020 post on Stephen Miller, I'd opened a draft about him back in early 2016, linking to an article about him at Santa Monica High School.  So I've known about his depravity a while.  I didn't know anything about his wife Katie, who appears to be just like him according to this article.  Here's just one episode that's described.

"In 12th grade AP English, she found a way to stand out. Her teacher was Simone Waite, a revered educator and one of the few African American faculty members at the school, which had a Black student population of just 4%. Waite was teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which she had done many times before, and gave them some historical background, including about slavery. “One of the many things it did was that it took away our history,” she told the class. Waldman didn’t like that, and asked, “Couldn’t they just tell each other about their history?” Waite explained that it wasn’t that easy. They went back and forth, but Waldman wouldn’t let it go. Seeing that they were in a rut, Waite told her that they should agree to disagree and move on with the lesson.

Waldman stopped coming to class and promptly drafted a petition, calling out Waite for being “psychologically damaging” and “sickening,” as the teacher recalls. Waite heard about it from a student, and was confused and devastated. The student assured her that no one agreed with Waldman. Waite eventually met with Waldman and her father, Glenn. After hearing both sides, Waldman’s father concluded, according to Waite, that “this teacher is extremely well-liked,” and that the best course of action would be to take Waldman out of her class.

Waite struggled not to take it personally, and eventually came to a realization. “I hesitate to say this, but it was about race. ‘Here is a Black woman teaching me this novel by another Black woman, and saying things that I definitely do not agree with politically,’” Waite posits. “She did whatever was in her power to show something. It just didn’t work.” There were aftershocks. Waldman was in two classes with Waite’s daughter, Alexandra, who was often the only Black kid in the class. Even after publicly trying to take down her mother, Waldman would text Alexandra to ask for homework help, as if nothing had happened. Alexandra and her mother didn’t know what to think. Alexandra and Katie weren’t friends. There were plenty of other kids to ask. It struck Waite as another kind of power play. Alexandra did her best to ignore Katie."

Get Out Your Brooms And Caring

From Nabih Bulos, a reporter in Beirut, published in the LA Times and other places.  He was near the blast and still can't account for two hours right after the blast, nor can he recognize the photos on his phone.  He woke up on the ground with an eye swollen shut and cuts on his arms.  I've picked out the hopeful part, the part that I think most Alaskans, masked or not, would do in an emergency:

"Nevertheless, a picture emerges of two things. One is that I was extremely lucky. The other — and this is a surprise for a card-carrying misanthrope like myself — is that people can be incredibly, almost irrationally kind in times of crisis.

One friend offered his car. Another drove my fiancee and me more than an hour outside Beirut to find a hospital that wasn’t inundated with casualties. A friend of my brother’s — whom I had never laid eyes on before — arranged for his neurosurgeon buddy to set up a CT scan appointment and eye examination, and chauffeured me from hospital to hotel to clinic. Everyone helped — no hesitation, no questions asked.

That generosity seems everywhere. In my neighborhood, roving bands of broomstick-toting volunteers walk around battered streets and apartments, sweeping away blood-soaked glass shards, pulverized furniture and the other detritus of lives shattered. Others grab tools, salvaging what materials they can to board up entrances and restore some semblance of normalcy for shell-shocked residents. Dozens of charitable groups and mutual aid organizations have reoriented themselves to dealing with the tragedy. All this is done in the almost complete absence of the state, whose carelessness appears to have caused the cataclysm in the first place."

Actually, we're in the middle of a slow motion emergency.  Let's get out those brooms and start sweeping away the epithets, the demands for trivial rights, and pick up our responsibilities to each other and to our democracy.  

Why Being Right Is So Satisfying, Even When You Would Prefer To Be Wrong

As those of you who follow this blog somewhat regularly know, I've been monitoring the daily changes in Alaska's COVID-19 count. (See the COVID-19 tab above.)  I've also been trying to keep up with what various people are discovering about the virus and how it spreads, both for my own personal protection as well as to be informed when I comment on our numbers.

When the Governor loosened the isolation rules for Alaska, I predicted that we would see an uptick in our numbers.  And that's happening.  Yesterday we had a new case high of 51 (not including non-residents) and today we blew past that with 64 new cases.

As the numbers have gone up I've been thinking about the internal conflict between wanting to be right, but wanting the virus to stay controlled, with low daily new case counts.

I can only speak about myself here. I  googled "Why do people want to be right?" to see what those who study this might say, compared to what I think.  But all the hits were for "Why do people NEED to be right?"  That wasn't my question.  All those articles talk about a culture of competition, needing to win, needing to not be wrong.  Much is in the context of marriage counseling - Would you rather be right or happy?  The articles talk about the complexity of issues and different perspectives which make 'being right' far more ambiguous.

But I've never been particularly competitive.  When I played tennis, I cared more about playing well than who won.   And I've figured out that in most cases, I don't NEED to be right.  My striving tends to be for understanding.  I could argue with someone about a topic and I can be pretty aggressive about it.  But it's not to 'win.'  It's to challenge the other person to show me the flaws in my thinking so I can get closer to the truth.

After that search for studies on why people want to be right failed, I remembered that BF Skinner had said that being right can itself a positive reinforcer.  And I found this: 

"According to Skinner, simply "being effective" or "being right" may be innately reinforcing."  

 Though since Skinner was usually a stickler for objective proof, this seems a little  soft for him.  He defined a reinforcer as something that causes you to repeat a behavior, when he saw people getting the right answer repeating their actions, with no apparent rewards,  he decided being right itself was the reinforcer. Not quite as objective as rats getting food by pushing a lever.  But  I think it is true for me.


A lot of this became much clearer when I took the DISC - a management personality test -  a long time ago and found out I was on the bottom of the Dominance scale.

For each of the four scales, Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness, there's a list of positive descriptors for each of the four characteristic and a negative list.  The thesis is that when you're doing well, you would exhibit the positive aspects and when stressed, the negative aspects.  For instance, if you score high in Dominance, the top of the scale was a descriptor like "Leader" on the good side and "Tyrant" on the negative side.  (I'm going by the test I took over 40 years ago.  I'm having trouble finding detailed descriptions of today's versions of the DISC - maybe because they want you to take the test before revealing the meaning.)

 I was stunned to learn I'd scored on the bottom of the Dominance scale.  My descriptor on the positive side was "Meek."  If that was the positive side, I was afraid to look at the negative side.  I felt better when I read the dictionary definition of meek.  (When I check online definitions today, their more like what I was thinking back then - spineless.)

But basically as I remember the definition that comforted me was something about not wanting to dominate other people.  So the biblical quote about the meek inheriting the earth, made more sense.   I think that's a natural tendency in me that was only strengthened by living in a Buddhist country for three years.

So, when I claim that my sometimes persistent  style is not about beating the other person, I have my DISC score to back me up.  I don't want to be right as much as to find out what is right.  If you present me with logic or evidence that is convincing, I'm happy, and I'll willingly acknowledge that you were right.  (Unless you've been a real jerk about it, then I'll do it a little less willingly.)

So as I try to answer this question about why is being right so satisfying, it's not about winning.  Rather, it's about having my understanding of things confirmed.  Having the way I think and solve problems proven to be useful to successfully navigating the world.

Lots of things in the world, as the psychologists pointed out in the articles on 'needing to be right'  just aren't right v wrong issues.  There are lots of complications and shades of gray.

So when there is something where facts can bear out what your mental models predicted, it's satisfying.  I think that's one reason why sports are so popular.  At the end of the game there's a resolution.  Your predictions about the winner or the score or the nature of the game, is known fairly quickly at the end of nine innings or four quarters.

The spread of COVID-19 is also born out with facts.  Based on what the science was telling us about how the virus spread, I believed that if more people mingled in public, in closed spaces, many without masks, that our numbers would rise.  And that's what's happening.  (And it's why our president wants to stop testing - so the numbers won't prove him wrong.  I'd note that I'm sure Trump would test over the top of the Dominance scale.)

Feeling good about predicting that our numbers would go up comes from the sense of control one gets from knowing that one can examine a situation and sort through different arguments and pick the ones that predict what actually happens.  It makes me feel safer when I stay home and avoid any indoor contact with others, and limit my outdoor contact.  I can lower the odds of contracting COVID-19.  The risks I take are minimum - biking on sparsely populated bike trails, with a mask ready to pull up if someone approaches, ordering food online and having it delivered to the car in the parking lot.  Washing my hands after getting the mail or newspaper.  Probably getting a little extreme, but it doesn't take that much effort or time.

I imagine others might come up with other non-winning kinds of reasons being right feels good.

Yet I don't want our COVID-19 numbers to go up.  I guess it's like betting against your favorite team - you don't want your team to lose, but if you're going to lose, you get something positive out of it.  I wonder if those folks who bet on a steep drop in the stock market have mixed feelings when they win big on someone else's disaster.   I suspect not.  There, being right is rewarding, but mainly because it allows one to cash in.

This all gets more complicated when there are real or perceived consequence for being wrong.  Politicians who downplayed what COVID-19 would do, tend to scramble to find the right language to say they were right all along, but that circumstances had changed.

And I would say, that you needed a better model that would have considered those possible circumstances and the probability they would occur.

History Catching Up To Us - Civil War Statues And Integrating New Orleans Schools

Rick Steves interviewed Jason Cochran, author of "Here Lies America." Cochran spoke about traveling to places where bad things happened and how they've been repackaged.  He talks a lot about the South - he's from Georgia - and how civil war battlefields were rebranded into tourist spots that glorified the world.  Here's a bit about a concerted effort to place Johnny Reb statues all over the South in the first two decades of the 20th Century.

"Drive through American South, and I’m from Georgia by the way, in front of almost every court house  in every town, you’ll see the famous little statue of Johnny Reb, the guy from the Confederate Forces.  Every little town you go to you’ll find this.  What I discovered in the course of researching this is that never were these things placed there right after the civil war.  The war ended in 1865.  Look at the next one you drive past, look down at the plaque, look at the year.  I’ll bet you anything it is probably from the 19 zero years or the 19 teens.  You have to wonder.  This was 50 years after the fact.  There’s a story here.  How did they all suddenly show up. . .  It was a concerted propaganda effort for lack of a better word. I think it was an education effort is the way they would have put it.  Let’s pretend you’re a resident of the South and probably 25 years old in 1900 and your grandfather is a mess because he had been. in the war.  You hear stories about how much land you used to own so you’re upset that you don’t own that anymore.  So there’s a lot of resentment happening in the South.  So the children and the grandchildren of the people who went to the civil war and suffered those blows and death those blows, they were the ones who built these statues. Because they wanted to reframe or expand upon how people saw the South and what they thought they were fighting for at the time.  There are people, even today, who would tell you that what is written on those statues is not what they would have put on them in the 1860s because the passage of time had colored things, but it was an effort.  There were women’s groups, by the hundreds of thousands women joined these groups, they would put out a catalogue and you could pick which statue you wanted and they would send their members to hector and lobby local governments.  They would make sure those statues were never placed in the cemetery, where these statues would usually go, but in front of a school or town hall where people would make sure to see it."

 I was impressed at how apolitically this was all presented, as if there were no controversy going on today about removing statues that glorify the Confederacy.  It's just presented as factual history.


And related, is this passage from the book I'm reading for my next book club meeting - The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom.

"Woodson Elementary, McDonogh 96, Hoffman Junior High, and Booker T. Washington - Josephe's, Elaine's, and Ivory's schools - were segregated for all of their school years and long after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education, the results of which were not seen in New Orleans until November 1960 when three six year-olds, Tessie Provost, Leona Tate, and Gail Etienne, dressed in full skirts and patent leather shoes, with massive white bows atop their heads, arrived in an all-white McDonogh 19, where they would remain the only three students in the school that entire year, taught in classrooms with brown paper taped to windows, blocking sun and jeers from white parents raging outside.  The same day in November first grader Ruby Bridges, the lone black girl surrounded by three US marshals, integrated William Frantz Elementary, spending half a school year as the only student.  A decade later, on the even of the 1970s, integration in New Orleans high schools would still cause riots.  Four decades later, it would remain factually incorrect to describe New Orleans schools as fully integrated."

Karens and Kevins have been around a long time.