(context he said “all politicians are sociopaths”)

This was a great film which unfortunately underperformed, but nevertheless, the Monster exemplifies sociopathy at its finest. He burns his first wife in a bathtub because she wouldn't touch him, and also disfigured his two girls. He gets acquitted and slices out the tongue of his lawyer so it wouldn't wag.

He abuses his second wife all while raising his boys to be just like him. There is one moment where he shows some care to his slain son, but it comes off more as something he owned being tarnished.

Bear starts the film as your typical "nice guy" who harbors feelings for his childhood friend Nikki Freeman. However, as the film goes on, he gets worse.

While you can make the argument that Bear was by no means a sociopath in the beginning because he didn't know that the One Wish Willow would work, you can't readily excuse the second portion of the film. His selfishness shows when he calls the number for the company producing the One Wish Willows and instead of wanting to cancel the wish, he instead wants to alter the wish and only cared if Nikki's love for him was real. But where he becomes near unforgivable has to be when he speaks to the real Nikki.

Freaky Nikki is sleeping which allowed the real Nikki to temporarily take control. She begs for Bear to put her out of her misery explaining that she was never dating him. However, Bear refuses out of offense at the notion that she would rather die than be with him never mind the fact that he clearly heard her suffering earlier.

It becomes crystal clear that he doesn't love Nikki for herself but rather a certain representation of her. He has sex with Nikki which, again because of the fact that she wasn't even in her body at the time, that would be rape and instead tries to fix things at the cost of the real Nikki suffering. It is nothing short of evil.

Even then, I could see the argument that "at least he did the right thing in the end." Yes... but that's only because he exhausted all his options. His backstabber of a friend Ian blows his wish on money which he didn't live to enjoy. And the second OWW is used by Freaky Nikki. He chooses to kill himself but even then he momentarily tries gagging which just demonstrates further his cowardice.

I think his sociopathy was featured even earlier than that with the scene of his cat's death. He stuffs his pet cat Sandy into a garbage bag that he apparently neglects to throw away. This may be because I am a cat lover but I would never stuff my dead pet in a bag. That is about as unceremonious as flushing a fish.

stop villainizing disorders guys 😭🙏

There is a quiet mechanism beneath his gestures, a ledger no one sees. Every kindness is entered, dated, preserved with a precision that would embarrass saints. He gives, yes, but not in the naive way of those who dissolve into their own goodness. No. He gives the way a strategist places a piece on a board he intends to overturn later. Each act becomes permission. Each restraint becomes currency. He does not say, “I am good.” He says, “I have paid.” And payment implies the right to withdraw.

This is the architecture of his morality. Not belief. Not devotion. Balance.

He understands something most people refuse to articulate. That morality, when observed long enough, begins to resemble a system of indulgences. A man feeds the hungry in the morning and feels an obscure loosening inside his chest by nightfall, as if some internal guard has stepped aside. The good deed does not elevate him. It authorizes him. It whispers, you are not the worst thing you are about to do.

And so the good sociopath constructs himself out of these permissions.

He will hold your hand when you tremble, and he will mean it in that moment. Do not comfort yourself with the idea that he is always pretending. That would make him simpler than he is. No. In the instant of kindness, he is sincere. The hand is warm. The voice softens. The eyes even learn how to look. But sincerity, for him, is not a foundation. It is a tool that dissolves when no longer required.

He does not fracture under contradiction. He feeds on it.

An ordinary person seeks consistency between action and identity. The good sociopath seeks leverage. He does not need to be good. He needs to have been good. That difference is everything. It allows him to step across lines others circle for years, paralyzed by the need to remain whole. He has already accepted that wholeness is a fiction. What remains is efficiency.

You will say this is monstrous. You will want to exile him from the category of the moral entirely. But look closer. How many people have felt that subtle absolution after doing what they believe is right. That faint internal voice that says, you have earned something. You have bought yourself a margin.

He is simply the one who does not look away from that voice.

He cultivates it.

He refines it until it becomes doctrine.

And here is the part that unsettles even me. Because he is not entirely wrong. The world does respond to accumulated goodness. Doors open. Doubt softens. Others forgive more easily. The past becomes a shield. He learns that morality is not only about what is right, but about what can be made to seem forgivable.

So he becomes careful. Not moral. Careful.

He spaces his kindness with intention, like breaths taken before a plunge. He understands that too much cruelty without prior investment exposes him. But cruelty preceded by visible virtue becomes complicated, arguable, even invisible. People hesitate. They remember who he has been. They edit what he is.

And in that hesitation, he moves.

Do you see it now. The good sociopath is not the absence of morality. He is its manipulation at the level of structure. He sees the joints, the hinges, the places where the human conscience bends under its own narratives.

He does not break the system.

He uses it exactly as it was always capable of being used.

And the final confession, the one he will never offer unless cornered, is this. He does not believe he is evil. He believes he is honest about the terms. Others want to feel pure while negotiating constantly with their impulses. He refuses the illusion of purity. He accepts the transaction and masters it.

That is why he is dangerous.

It troubles me further to know only around 1% of us see this as our natural way of life. Perhaps it took me 30 years to realize this because I comprise one tiny fraction of that 1%, or perhaps I am the first to form in words some answers the whole of us sought only in thought.

From what we presently understand, entropy is the process through which order fulfills its intrinsic yearning to embody chaos. Organisation is the opposite. Whilst all creation works to find its way back, chaos itself yearns for order. Longing succumbs once again to longing and the cycle continues on through all of spacetime. Even black holes organise themselves into patterns.

By default, human nature is constructively empathic. Approximately 95% of us hold a natural ability to share emotion and operate that way without thinking. 4% of us are sociopathic, which means through some form of trauma or another, we found the empathetic off switch. Sociopaths have the choice to share feelings or not.

Our remaining demographic, around 1% of the population, is born with no ability to feel emotion other to themselves, sometimes even no concept that others have emotions. As a result, this sub-populace is not calibrated to feel the same range and magnitude of emotion shared by the empathic majority. We term this subset of humans psychopathic.

Most people I have encountered agree that psychopaths can be dangerous, are typically intelligent and usually conniving. In fact, I can't recall a sentiment by word of mouth or internet spatter about us to any positive effect. It's a personality 'disorder.' However, being as it were that I believe in the sanctity of all life, including my own, I decided I would endeavour to encapsulate the purpose and evolutionary significance of psychopathy.

What I came up with was a fascinating analogy I hope resonates: psychopathy is to humanity what gut flora are to your microbiome. Although disadvantageous in large proportions, to the point of systemic collapse, it's common that both psychopathy and acidophilus in small quantities ensure the longevity of the environment around them.

Psychopathy is not inherently dangerous, it's just unpredictable. The reason that we're unpredictable is that we operate outside of the empath grid, in individual worlds that are mostly quiet and usually devoid of emotion. We don't concern ourselves with any individual who is not us. Our core is with the human collective and what of it can be observed objectively.

If every person acts like a psychopath, which is what we saw attempted in capitalism, substantially nobody gets ahead. If you do manage to get ahead, don't expect to stay there for longer than 15 minutes without selling your soul. Psychopathy only works when it's minute.

Our optimal level of psychopathy is 1%, or around 80 million of an 8-billion population. For every psychopath born, about 4 sociopaths must evolve as feedback loops. This helps rebalance the amount of empathy offset by the presence of psychopathy. Think of it like tempering empathetic antimatter.

Sociopathy evolves from trauma in a wounded empath. In rare cases, it may evolve from a psychopath falling in love, but this would typically only take place if society is on the verge of collapse.

Psychopaths absorbed fully in service to self might perceive empathy as a weakness, which is where sociopathy comes into play. Because sociopathic individuals have a choice whether or not to feel empathy, they can turn it on to communicate with empaths effectively, and off to relate feedback to psychopathic leadership. With the exception of 'dark empaths', psychopaths are typically averse to communicating directly with empaths, or through empathy in general. For us, emotional throughput is exhausting and excruciatingly overstimulating.

Humanity, as it is represented in and among ourselves, cannot be agile without opposition. If our entire population was empathic, there would be no opposing state and humanity would stagnate. We need a fractional populace of psychopaths with the audacity to deviate from status quo and keep the whole of us from impinging on humanity's evolution.

If you asked me at the beginning of last spring what I thought about this newly-realized psychopathy and how damaging it can be, I would tell you I was terrible and better off dead. It took some targeted soul-searching and coming to terms with a new human reality before I could embrace what I perceived to be a mutation in my genetic structure. I hope reading this through gives my fellow psychos and others a shift in perspective, too.