“It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy. Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.”
tl;dr? Cliff’s Notes:
The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.
This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.
Need some defense for that conclusion? I should think you would. Here’s the full chapter:
Empathy for the monster.
I can give you a very simple formula for the empathy for the monster: Take your pre-existing dysempathy for the untouchable – your niggardly refusal to attribute human emotions to him – and combine it with a big fat dollop of the empathy for the impossible.
Bingo! Instant monster. You already don’t want to believe the untouchable is truly a human being, so refusing to believe in his human motivations while imbuing him with colossally amazing impossible characteristics makes for a thing you can slaver and slobber over in your every living nightmare.
So we fear terrorists and drug cartels and carjacking tweakers and teenage gang-bangers and steely-eyed state troopers with itchy trigger fingers. Not to deprive you of your entertainment, as the mass media sells and resells you your own misery, but the disaster that is most likely to befall you is the failure of your marriage – caused, I know without much doubt – by your failure to put first things first, as evidenced by this disproportionate empathy for the monster.
The Grand Unifying Theory of Human Motivation – as taught to me by a turtle, and by an eternally-outraged human reptile.
To read more about empathy, see me, feel me, touch me, heal me at Amazon.com.
Does that sound right to you?
“But, but, but… But what about sociopaths? What about narcissists? What about malignant narcissists – monsters made with super-powered empathy for the impossible. How can you say they have empathy when they’re all so mean?”
How was it that the bully on the schoolyard had so much empathy for you, when he was taunting you so cruelly?
Because moral philosophy is inverted, everything else is, too. Moral behavior is self-adoring, not self-sacrificial. Immoral behavior is self-destructive – not ‘cool.’ The mysterious monsters of the academy’s pantheon of evil are not without empathy. They have more of it than anyone. Empathy is how they survive in a world they have misidentified as being relentlessly hostile to them. The interior mental states of the people around them are the hand-holds they use to navigate the seemingly infinite gauntlet that is reality to a human mind this enduringly damaged.
Do you have empathy for the person, for the opposite, for the untouchable? This is all that the monsters of science really are, horribly abused children whose only survival strategy, even more horribly, is to replicate the abuse by abusing you.
But what makes it abuse is the outrage – the victim’s particular and excruciating emotional pain – and what makes the outrage outrageous is the empathy – the empathy the bully had to possess in order to wound you with such perfectly-honed, perfectly-aimed, perfectly-timed outrages. It cannot be the case that a human being expresses the inability to experience empathy with a torrential fusillade of malicious empathy.
Here is one more way of thinking about empathy for the monster, and this one has the inestimable benefit of real monsters – Gila Monsters, at least.
Yeah, I’m talking about reptiles. Why? Because you are one, that’s why.
To make this argument, I must hypothesize and metaphorize, two Platonistic scientific-sounding words that mean I plan to make wild guesses about what may be a specious analogy. And yet this is how human knowledge grows – by means of empathy for the idea.
So, as we noted, you lived the first five years of your life as a nascent human being. You were a living genetic Homo sapiens at the instant of conception, but you lived a life a lot like your mammalian forebears from then until you woke up as a human being at around age five. Until you realized that the verbal semaphores you had been using denoted abstract conceptual categories, not specific referents. Until you began to think exclusively in concepts. Until you commenced that internal conceptual monologue that has kept you company ever since. Until you began to guide your behavior by free will – by rationally-informed discretion.
The thing that makes you uniquely human is that rational conceptual abstract thought and the consequent freedom of the will. Not the thinking brain itself. It can be defective, it can go uncultivated or the capacity for human thought can be eradicated in a particular brain by a non-lethal head injury.
But the brain that kept you alive and learning while your parents were nurturing and cultivating your thinking brain into being was your vestigial mammal brain – the thing in you that likes to play and cuddle and to get all ooey-gooey with emotion.
And the thing that keeps both of those brains alive, along with everything else in your body, is your mammal brain’s vestigial reptile brain.
This is known as the theory of the Triune Brain, and I emphasize that I am playing with it as a metaphor. Every purposive action taken by a human being – including exclusively-introspective actions – is the product of free will, informed discretion. Your two vestigial brains never shut up about all their unmet needs – the seemingly irrational biological influences scientists love to measure as a way of dismissing free will as the sine qua non cause of human behavior – but the thinking brain cannot be compelled to choose, not by anything or anyone. All organisms are exclusively internally-controlled – but the thinking brain knows it. This is the freedom that set the will – common to all higher organisms – free.
Even so, those other two brains are still there in your skull, and they’re both handling big parts of your habituated day-to-day behavior.
Your mammal brain is really only interested in very positive, loving emotions: In playing, in cuddling – and in mating, which is the best of both. My guess is that the things scientists measure that they misidentify as the empathy-of-self-sacrifice are mammal-brain phenomena. They insist they’re seeing voluntary self-despoliation when what they are actually failing to identify are the practical expressions of love.
Your reptile brain does all the scut work of homeostasis, much of it in a hugely autonomous way. You can suppress a sneeze – badly – but you cannot initiate one. You can take minute motor-muscle control over your body, but only by a process of patient instruction of your reptile brain, and it will continue to operate all of those muscles autonomously, as needed, regardless of how much you might want to micro-manage these things. Doubt me? Choke on a piece of bread and see how much insight, wisdom and prudent management your thinking brain brings to the party.
Here’s a fascinating fact: Your mammal brain doesn’t know you’re more than a mammal. It doesn’t know anything mammals don’t know, which is everything when we think of knowledge in the thinking brain’s way – as verifiable abstract conceptual information encoded in formal notation systems like complex memory, discursive prose or mathematical or musical notation. But this is why you are sexually-aroused by images of fully-dressed people in provocative poses – as seen, for example, on the covers of romance novels. Your mammal brain doesn’t see the clothes, just the cuddly playfulness of two pretty people mating.
And of course, your reptile brain doesn’t know you’re not simply a reptile. Mammals play and cuddle. What do reptiles do? They bask in perpetual fear. A reptile’s management of its own life consists of the obsessive micro-management of its environment. Reptiles pursue opportunities by avoiding risks, all as the result of genetic winnowing – fitness to breed – happening after birth rather than by mate selection.
If love is the default mental state of mammals, with the temporary interruption of playing and cuddling being the world’s only ills, what would you suppose is the default mental state of a reptile?
How about fear?
Reptiles fear, and they manage their environment by eliminating or mitigating any cause they might have to feel fear.
Did you see those two important words at the end of the last paragraph: “Feel fear.” Your empathy does not originate in your thinking brain, and it does not originate in your mammal brain. You owe your empathy to your reptile brain.
Empathy is a reptilian survival strategy that seeks to self-induce something like serenity as the consequence of having identified and materially addressed every immediately obvious existential threat. Empathy is risk management. It matters to reptiles just as it does to mammals, because both have to be able to predict the behavior of potential predators or competitors and respond appropriately.
Consider the idea of the challenge, the martial display that is intended to get a potential enemy to back down. This is aggression, but as with pretending not to see untouchables in order to avoid being burdened by them, it is aggression by pre-emptive empathy: The display is not a response to an incursion but an anticipation of one, a pantomimic pre-quarrel initiated by the party who has declared himself to be pre-aggrieved. That sort of challenge is a reptile’s greeting strategy: “Get lost before you really get hurt.”
Interestingly, we see that same kind of pre-emptive empathy in some untouchables, who, whether borne of madness, melancholy or mischief, put on over-the-top monster displays, hugely exaggerated challenges. The purpose is exactly the same: The way I have of dealing with you that I like best is to chase you away right away.
The challenge itself is poetry, art, the pretended reality that the buyer accepts, at least temporarily, as if it were a real and very palpable reality – the empathy for the subjunctive that becomes to the buyer an empathy of the monster – the fictional thing that nevertheless inspires genuine fear. It is an enacted aggression intended to lead the buyer to the choice – to run away – that otherwise might require further persuasion by way of violence and the corresponding risk of retaliation. The seller truly does not intend to follow through on the threat. His pre-emptively empathetic expression seeks to prompt the desired empathetic response to what is in fact a false proxy signal.
Call that strategy reptilian repulsion, the polar opposite of the reciprocal enloving attraction of mammalian empathy. But it is a common behavioral pattern. My own outsized arrogance is a decent example: Not by intention, just by being so relentlessly high-D, I put people on notice that any challenge addressed to me will occasion more than just a tussle. High-Cs spare their minds from the chaos of the real by rejecting almost every new idea they encounter. High-Is can be needy and grasping at the same time. Everyone is trying to get his own needs met. Mammalian empathy takes by giving. Reptilian empathy takes by taking – a perfectly monstrous social strategy that doesn’t pull a lot of repeat business.
Click the link for much more on DISC-my-way.
The reptilian drives are completely self-motivated, obviously, but also completely devoid of concern for any other entity’s feelings. Mammals care about mutually-beneficial empathy, because this amplifies the playing/cuddling feedback loop – the shared state of mutual enlovingness – all because the behavior is mutually-rewarding. The reptile’s purpose in engaging in this kind of empathetic modeling is strictly self-seeking: The reptile wants to know what you’ll do so he can counter it, oppose it, deflect it, defeat it – eliminate the threat.
This is the monster, basically a monster of misapprehension. Every human being has the mammal brain’s empathy, which is itself the mammalian expression of the reptile brain’s empathy. When the mammal brain is eviscerated by repeated outrages, the reptile brain’s empathy is what’s left – under the seething control of an enduringly-outraged reptile. The incoming sensory information is exactly the same, but the goals being pursued are very different: The mammal brain idealizes infinite love – but it is easily distracted. The reptile brain craves infinite safety – relentlessly.
Paging Professor Clueless. Your sociopath is here.
Love and malice are both made of empathy. Taking account of the nature of the empathy for the person, it cannot be otherwise: You cannot either delight or wound a particular person without having empathy for that person. There are no monsters, just a few very-badly-damaged, very-badly-behaved human beings – and the very reptilian academics who get paid to make risible, specious, hysterical claims about them.
