#forempaths

28. he sees himself as a predator

And I still consider him otherwise...

But this said, he is not totally wrong. He lurks here, in the bushes, hunting the empath without conscience or remorse for the pain he could cause. He needs to eat energy! And to him it is only nature’s order that the strong are the hunters when the weak are the hunted.

But the laws of the jungle are antithetic to civilization and progress. Political parties founded exclusively by his kind always talk about going backwards, to a time when it felt good living at others’ expenses. With his Neanderthal mind, dooming the weak to an early grave, he is a hindrance to progress. Because the physically weak or the person born on the wrong side of the railroad, can easily be the smarter, the inventor, the creative mind, the genius, the spiritual guide, the wise... the one who will have humanity go forward with him.

If we succeeded in getting out of the Middle-Age it is in spite of the manipulator. Not thanks to him.

And it’s no coincidence, to my mind, if, since he has made a huge comeback these last thirty years, we turn back to the good old days of economic servitude and pandemic. Because too many manipulators in power means a massive return of corruption, incompetence, entitlement, lies and exploitation.

The manipulator sees us as preys and underestimates us. Underestimates the courage and abnegation of those who can fight for a cause bigger than themselves or who fight for those they love.

A difference between the manipulator and the predator, though, is that the manipulator prefers to stay in the shade, when the society isn’t favourable to his kind. Whereas a tiger doesn’t hide his stripes. In North Korea or other China, on the contrary, I imagine it’s party time everyday for a manipulator. And I can’t fathom the hell it must be for the minority of empathetic people there.

But if I’m right about the world’s evolution, this hiding won’t last long. And the sooner the better, because if 100% of manipulators know their “eat and be eaten” game, a very few percentage of good people are aware of the fight and what is at stake. Most of the time, this minority is composed by ex-victims.

Quite easy and no sport, then, to hunt when the antelope doesn’t know her life is on the line.

Once you know where to look, on the contrary, it’s often child play to detect them.

29. he has a paranoid tendency

Well of course, just imagine! We all have this tendency to put our own way of thinking is the other’s mind. And this makes us, empathetic people, more prone to naivete, jumping bambis in the sunset and in the crossfire of automatic guns.

But this makes him paranoid. Others want to rob him, have no conscience, will betray him, will cheat on him...

The world is full of bad guys, he knows it. And the manipulator only sleeps with one eye open. Or can’t sleep at all.

30. he doesn’t like rules

Rules are for the weak, he thinks. If he can despise or rape them, it’s fine. If he can change them in his own interest, it’s better still.

There are too many times when he must pretend to respect the rules. And it’s exhausting.

31. he is greedy and confuses success with financial success

Of course! For him everything turns around looks, power and money. And what is dangerous is when the way he feels become the dominant philosophy. I guess there is only a certain amount of manipulators a society can bear at its head, in companies and politics, before we spiral down in a vicious circle. Because the manipulator will change the mentalities to favour his kind, making it easier for others manipulators to climb, who in turn will aggravate the mentalities...

For ten years, I have this feeling that the world is going faster and faster in manipulation land. Which means darker and darker. And I fear we’ll have to touch the bottom before it gets better.

This overwhelming mentality contributes to the fact that so many good people feel bad, can feel like  they are failing if they concentrate on being a good parent, or a just teacher or a faithful spouse. Hit again and again by these golden and superficial lives on the social media, most good people can get depressed.

The manipulator is also greedy. His overinflated ego is always whispering him he deserves more. And this answers the question I had, as a good naive empathetic person: why would a billionaire choose to paint his tenth swimming pool with god instead of raising wages?

Because he deserves it and the others don’t deserve anything more than the bare minimum to survive and be able to work for him.

So of course, to avoid the possibility that poor people get to the pitchforks and attack his bunker, he’ll give to charities, elegant way of talking with his social peers about the wellness of the peasants around appetizers. And also, to save taxes. And the rich manipulator will always prefer this way of giving money, which allows him to control where it goes, preferably in causes more glamour and selling than repairing roads and will also allow him to build a nice philanthropic image for himself. Also, it will help sustain an economic system that favours him. Because in reality, a good economic system, in a rich democracy, is the one where everybody pays his just amount of taxes and everybody can earn a fair wage, one that you can live on. Where, in fact, nobody should need charity.

Also, the internal vacuum of the manipulator is a bottomless pit that encourages him to get always more. The manipulator isn’t Iron Man, the philanthropist superhero but Pac Man: always hungry, never satisfied.

And he doesn’t care if the planet would die of it. Because as the delectable Duchess of Windsor would have said: “one is never rich enough”.

32. he divides and conquers

He is a master of triangulation, this art which consists in using a third person in the toxic relations he has with you. He will use this other person against you, having told him lies where he is the victim. Or have you understand that this person thinks you are wrong. And have you hate him in the process.

On his chess board, he is the king or the queen and others are pawns.

His hot-air-balloon ego is fragile and he is a coward in confrontation where the adversary isn’t weak and could fight back He will, in this case, send somebody else to do the dirty job.

In some extreme cases, the manipulator can cut you totally from your friends and family. He’ll act like it’s you and him in a fortress, having you believe that everybody else is mean. Enclosed in the tower, the victim is more powerless than ever.

These are not, of course, voices with different tonalities and sources that would give us the impression that someone else is living with us in our head and Napoleon wants to talk to us. Of course not!

It’s just that as time went by – too much of it!- and maturity is coming upon me, with, I hope, the least possible wrinkles, I tried to identify the source and pertinence of each of my thoughts… And I felt we could attribute each one of them to six different voices.

The easiest one to notice, for example is the voice of intelligence. It’s the one that thinks, counts, evaluates

And we feel its cogs turning. As it’s the voice going through every possibility, it’s also the one which is scared. When you board a plane, for example, and your frenetic thoughts are showing you every chance this could go wrong ? Till the tiniest duck who could tickle the turbines? Well, this is your cleverness going on overdrive.

Being smart enables you to find solutions, but by showing you all the possible disastrous outcomes, it also prevents you from acting, simmering as you are, in a soup of fears.

And I find intelligence is a little over-evaluated in school. The smartest among us are not necessarily the ones who will succeed better, if they haven’t managed to subdue their fear to act.

Dumb people dare anything, I’ve been told. And clever ones don’t dare enough.

The voice of your cleverness has no empathy for others and will clinically analyse situations and people, the better to help you deal with them or manipulate them.

Luckily, this side effect has begun to be more and more taken into account recently and more and more schools give importance to the emotional intelligence.

This emotional cleverness is what I call the voice of the heart.

Which I find, as well, easy to identify because it’s the one that has you feel: love for others, an animal or an activity, compassion for the suffering of others – not to be confused with the compassion some have for themselves which has them drown in everlasting victimhood -, empathy…

The third voice is one that has also been more and more acknowledged lately: the voice of intuition, that is also called sixth sense. Or gut feeling for the less spiritual among us who think with their stomachs. Happens to me when I’m really hungry, though.

This voice is the one that I have the worst trouble identifying when it’s so important to: it’s the wise one, the one that is never wrong. It’s the one you should listen to, for example, when it disagrees with your intelligence. Your brain is whispering all the horrible ways you could die in a plane? Your intuition is assuring you that you’ll arrive safely. And it knows best.

Because the voice of intuition is connected.

To the collective unconscious, the energies, and, for those who believe in them – and it’s my case – to invisible presences.

After some decades on this earth, I only begin to perceive its peculiar tone: it’s much wiser than I would be on my own, it points to a luminous evidence and it’s so immediate, you know you hadn’t the time to think.

When I ask myself something, and in the following silence an immediate answer comes to me and feels right? Most of the time, it’s intuition.

The fourth voice is the ego voice. And this, I also find easy to identify.

It’s the “me me me voice” that rings when it feels someone is walking on your turf and his. It surely has been created, this voice, out of a primitive need to defend you in an hostile world. To give you the impulse to fight, because you deserve everything, and to forbid compassion for others and the lion who would eat you because, poor animal, you feel he’s hungry. He’s hungry, hears the ego? “It means he is feeble. Eat him.”

Your ego thinks you are more important than this lion, the savanna and the whole planet. You are just what has been the most important creation so far. The greatest. Number one.

And to give you the best survival chance, it’s the ego that will blow on the fire of your temper.

Your divine rights have been trampled on? Aux armes! No pity for this fool who hasn’t understood your rightful place in the universe, right in the centre.

The ego voice begins to make itself heard, when a baby realizes that he has a distinct identity from his mother. The famous temper of a two years old? For something or nothing and a toy that has been refused? Ego. And the most part of the education we give a kid, to enable him to be an emotionally balanced adult, is to teach him that no, the stars don’t gravitate around his navel. And no, neither does the moon.

And this voice, made at first for you, to enable the carcass to survive, can drag you easily on the narcissism path. Mainly because to give you self-confidence, it will flatter you shamelessly. The ego voice is also the one to always compare. Do you have more than the neighbour? Less than your sister? No? Yes? Beware, the ego knows you deserve better!

And he will find here another reason to defend you and get annoyed in the process. Why you? Why me? To him, you are obviously a victim of an unjust situation. And that alone should  give him all leeway to change matters. Too bad if others must suffer in the process. “It doesn’t matter, says the ego, you are the most important.”

We all have an ego. Some chose to self-isolate in mountains and pray to get detached from it To dissolve it in a superior energy. Well, I’m not there yet.

Another simpler solution, which I favour, doesn’t include so much meditation: it’s to balance the ego voice with the voice coming from the heart. Which has you think something like this: ” yes, you are important, also imperfect, and this other human being is important too. And so is this animal, and this tree…”

But if Ego, looking for a co-conspirator, despising the heart, finally meets Intelligence, bam, nitro has found glycerine. More often than not, it’s Intelligence, hypersensitive, full of doubts and easily scared that runs to Ego, to have him protect her.

Well yes, now Intelligence is a she when Ego is a he: I’m French and we put a gender on anything.

But whoever went in search of the other, a person, when dominated by these two, permanent victim of some real or imaginary wrongdoing, has now the means to get revenge, to manipulate and obtain everything ego wished. Honours, money, power, disciples, electors, victims, kids, family… he’ll get his fill. Hello, there, psychopaths!

In the process, he’ll have strangled the fifth voice, the voice of the conscience.

It’s the one who reminds me, when I reproach something to somebody – often my husband – that I did the same. This traitor doesn’t like bad faith and can pitch for the other camp.

This voice also tells me to be more understanding, doesn’t appreciate it when I’m angry. He wants me to be a better person. And he is so annoying!

But it’s his job. And I forgive him because I know it’s for me, in a broader sense: to enable me to become the best version of myself.

And the sixth voice?

Well, it’s simply the one from your soul or your personality. The one that is uniquely yours. The paradox being that ego could never be that, as it’s the same in everyone.

Mine has a ferocious sense of humour that prevents me to be too serious about myself and loves having fun.

This ordeal can enable us to learn from our mistakes and build a better world. But a negative person won't ever so it: he will never take his responsibilities.

And what is true for mountaineers is true for socialites.

I wrote an article I have not yet published that explains how good guys underestimate the amount of bad guys. And that bad people reveal themselves a lot more in times of crisis. I thought about wars or revolutions. But the current crisis is also accurate.

My estimation, based on books, observation, logic, history and, dare I confess, clairvoyance, is that there are around 35% of negative people in most democracies, the countries where we are less traumatized and thus, not pushed into survival mode.

In non-democratic countries, where this survival instinct has been activated, it has also the side effect to have people put the best of humanity aside, compassion and love, and it's my belief that in Russia and China, for example, the positive citizens are a minority. And it must be hell for a person with empathy, I feel, to live there.

Among this negative people, there are roughly 30% of selfish persons, who do not manipulate and can still have some conscience wake-up calls, 40% of narcissists who are manipulators without conscience but less Machiavellian cleverness than the other 30% of psychopaths or sociopaths. And this is to bring back to the total. In any given democracy, it means there would be roughly 10% of psychopaths.

And in peace time, this little world of egotistical people is more or less hiding behind the social norm of our "modern" times. But when there is a crisis, they clearly enjoy being themselves.

It could have been arrogance or it could have been a tough childhood that had the manipulator cut himself form a good part of his emotions. Notably the best part: at the bottom of his Pandora box, there is only pleasure left.

And with this spectrum of emotions which has him feel more like a stone than a human, it will be so much easier for him to adapt to social distancing - doesn't know anguish, nor depression - and to boast, from this "moral" point of view, that it's very easy to cope with the stuff, that you "just" have to lounge on a couch, or "just" have to watch TV.

And when, on Instagram, some people expect followers to admire their example, telling them that you "just" have to push on your internal happiness switch, as if we were all just clocks, I would bet a lot, that they are manipulators. And more so when this advice is written under a selfie.

The manipulator doesn't fear much but he fears being discovered, getting old, getting sick and death.

Not for those he loves, of course, he loves nobody but himself. Or yes, sometimes, those he sees as a projection of himself. His survival is essential to him, it may have been the reason he chose to cut himself from emotions. I do not mean here, that we, positive people, have reached a Buddhist detachment but that we are able to take risks for others and believe in something or someone more important than we are. For the manipulator, his own end is the end of the world. And the spectre of this Coronavirus has him lash out; anger is one of the emotions he has left. I'm  not surprised, then, when I read that conjugal violence is rising. As do divorces. And racial crimes.

Some negative people, in France, will harass medical staff, putting messages in mailboxes, asking nurses to think about their health - the nerve! - and move. Some owners will even put an end to rental contracts without notice. And I dare say it's not even legal.

Without a spouse or a scapegoat, you can always lash out on Twitter or from a window. Lynching and stoning is a group pleasure no negative person could refuse. And social media, in our “civilized” times is quite as good as the real thing. "Stay home" will he shout without bothering to know what the purpose of the walk is. The good old mask of virtue and common good allows some to express anger and hate with impunity.

The solitary walk in a forest is, it would seem, after the masturbation, the least dangerous activity in these dangerous times and it has been, within limits, authorized in France. And this hasn't prevented some, there, on Twitter, to clutch their pearls and threaten to shoot the walker. I even saw a picture of a tarpaulin under which the would-be-murderer claimed he wished to put his future victims. Murdering someone or talking about it, in the name of an hypothetical common good, in general, is a good indication of hypocrisy or manipulation. Torquemada comes to mind, who, in his own time, would have had the reputation of a saint, taking care of others’ souls, while enjoying the legal torture. Or Robespierre, claiming that in the name or purity and the good of a whole country, he was ready to behead half of it. And would have done so if he hadn't succumbed to his own tool first.

And it will be the same profile, and even the same person, who will walk his dog ten times a day or rent one, still clothed with the same respectability cloak, because in this case, you use the basis of the law, if not the spirit.

There is also some anger that can at least express itself in some French regions when they slash tires or damage the paint of cars that seem to come from other counties, worst of all... from Paris! They can at last show what they really think about the loathsome Parisian. And certainly, some people who have run to their secondary house when travelling was forbidden and they knew the consequences on the local community, may have been negative people. But it was not necessarily the case of those who had this reflex at the beginning of everything when they had no apparent symptoms. If I had been living in a flat at the time, in the absence of rules and thorough information on the matter, honestly, I don't know what I would have done. And the good people who indiscriminately damage others' cars (one local doctor whom it happened to, had a borrowed car with a "foreign" license plate ) should think that they should take care of their reputation. Because it would have an impact on tourism and their future prosperity.

When, in front of the crisis, and in the absence of any possible panic attack, so many citizens are hoarding toilet paper or disinfectant, hurting others who will have none, this lack of solidarity, this selfishness can also be the sign of someone being negative. Some go farther still, selling this stock at higher price: taking advantage of chaos and others is so manipulator 101.

In the united States, we have the selfishness and narcissism of young people who don't want to skip Spring Break and party on the beach before coming home and redistributing generously the virus among their families. The youngest among us are also those with the less symptoms and I hope they'll think twice before kissing their grand-mother. As, in a recent post, I spoke about this possible tendency, for older persons, to worry more and feel bitterness, I can as well have all generations hate me, telling that there are negative people of all ages.

And freedom, this right this country holds dear shouldn't be a right to be selfish.

Because those of us with a conscience know that our freedom stops where the others' begins.

We witness also, in the same country, the most extraordinary protests of negative people: a collective of Trump fans who protest in compact groups during a pandemic, against the closing of shops and stay at home orders. In the name of extreme individual freedom, the one that has no respect whatsoever for others' and is just selfishness in disguise. What I find interesting is that what I've seen written the most on their placards, is a demand to go to the hairdresser, which is plain shameless narcissism. The faces are scary masks of hatred and anger, the talk without any empathy, nor ambiguity: "these people will die anyway". No matter the number of deaths among others, as long as I can have my my my haircut. A speedy class on the sense of priority of negative people.

The most odious is when these people harass or insult medical staff that work day and night to save others, risking their mental and physical health. So, of course, there are also negative people among the medical staff, - I've been raised among them, I should know - but I can't imagine the anguish and sadness for the positive ones among them who work to save others. The horror.

The manipulator, the negative one, reveals himself in time of crisis.

And I think about my fellow good people who take risks to help others, without judging or condemning those who wouldn't be as exceptional. For example, this doctors who will maybe have to cure some of these protesters with nice haircuts who spit on them the previous day.

I think about my fellow empaths who, as well as having to fight against their own stress and fear, will be enclosed with a negative person focused on draining their energy. Who will suck them, and unload on them and generally show the whole range of his toxicity off.

The only good side of this is to have to toxic ones reveal themselves. Also their values and influence on a world and a destructive economy.

And when the worst will have gone, they will have learned nothing and won't have changed.

And in the absence of real political conviction, they'll just choose the most opportunistic program, do their show and seduce their electors.