Homecoming Parade, University of Idaho — accompanies one of the big football games of the year.  2011 (I think!)

One of my best buddies when it comes to scheming stuff up, and out, is Jake Leachman, Assistant Professor in the School of MME, where I work.  Jake’s a thermodynamicist, specializing in the development of the Hydrogen Economy.  His blog, hydrogen.wsu.edu, is somewhere in between a public consumption blog, and one where he communicates with his students taking his various classes, which are often applications of design methodology.  I love teaching with Jake, for multiple reasons.  First off, he’s creative.  And second off, he understands all my babble.  Which is saying something!  He’s also been critical in my evolution of the direction and purpose of empathetic connection.  As he’s fond of saying, you don’t have much choice but to obey the laws of Thermodynamics — even if you’re talking about social structures.  Because they’re the Law!!

Jake is also an ex-football player for the University of Idaho, the campus next door.  He recently started applying Spiral Dynamics to football organizational structures.  That’s American football.  I wish I knew enough about football to understand everything in this piece, but for those that love the game, this may be a pathway for understanding the rest of what I write about.  There’s some questions I have for my good friend, though, and I’m going to lean on him to write about how Legalistic v-Meme rules can prevent Communitarian v-Meme development.  But for now, you can read his analysis here.  Good fun!

One version of Rat Park, Snake River above Lewiston, ID, 2007

One of the more interesting and profound experiments done on the power of connection was in the Rat Park addiction studies by Bruce Alexander, a professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia.  Alexander set out to show that our view of addiction, framed as either a.) a moral failing, where the individual doesn’t have the ‘moral fiber’ (whatever that means) or personal character to face the world, and so self-pleasures themselves in a destructive spiral using harmful drugs, or b.) a genetic condition or disease that predisposes them to using drugs in an abusive fashion, causing a downward spiral of self-destruction, was fundamentally incorrect — and actually neither of those things.  To prove these were not major factors, Alexander created Rat Park — a social system of rats subject to addictive potentials, and watched the results.

Readers of this blog will recognize a mix of v-Memes inherent in a.) and b.).  Moral fiber sounds kind of legalistic, but it’s really magical thinking — no one can really define it, though, at some levels it may be associated with following some tenets of society.  “You know it when you see it” — when I hear this, I immediately start wondering about egocentric projection.  One person’s moral fiber might be someone else’s mush.

As for b.), an individual with some genetic condition or disease?  That’s definitely more able to be diagnosed.  There are benchmarks that can be measured, and an algorithm that can be followed in determining if someone is an addict.  Meet conditions 1,2,3.  You’re an addict.  And likely, if you believe the Legalistic Authoritarians, you got there through your own doing — by following another algorithm.  Drill 20 holes in your arm, shoot up heroin, and voila!  By the 21st, you’re baked — both literally and figuratively.

What’s the way out?  Well, we have another algorithm — a 12 Step Program.  Follow these rules, which start with admitting you have no personal agency (every 12 Step Program starts by the individual admitting they are powerless over the substance they are addicted to) and hand off your responsibility to a Higher Power.  All 12 Step Programs are fascinating — and they’re not all bad, though their efficacy is highly overrated for the reasons that they give.  But we’ll unpack those at a later time.

Where does this socially fragmented view of addiction come from?  Remember Conway’s Law, that says the designed product, and through the Intermediate Corollary, the knowledge structure, will map to the social/relational structure of the designers.  Add in that broader cultural understandings are almost always limited by the dominant v-Memes of a given society.  Way back before we had anything resembling scientific reasoning, we had any kind of disease viewed as a moral failing or Divine Punishment, mapping back to the extremely old Magical v-Meme of Original Sin.  Pretty powerful stuff.

The idea of a medical condition involving addiction evolved more recently, predicated on experiments involving  isolated rats in a cage.  The fundamental idea behind those experiments was a rat was placed alone in a cage, and given two choices — a bottle of regular water, and a bottle of water laced with cocaine and opium.  In only a short while, the rat would drink only from the opium-laced bottle, and basically drink itself to death.  Needless to say, there was pretty limited empathetic connection between the rat and the researcher — and not only for the fact that the researcher wasn’t patting the rat.

But the experiment had all the things that good science likes — repeatability and reliability, as well as the consequent status elevation — being able to be published in a prestigious journal.  Any effect of the social isolation of the rat was discounted — it’s only a rat, after all.  And the rats all lined up in their cages weren’t too far off from the social structure of a standard university faculty office suite.

Entering Stage Left was Bruce Alexander, the aforementioned psychology professor.  Alexander questioned the very basis of the study.  Rats don’t live like that, he said, and besides, we line up people in hospitals every day, and give all sorts of patients powerful opiates.  After they exit the hospital and go back to their families, they don’t become addicts.  If we really want to study addiction with rats, Alexander said, we have to create something more normative for rats — Rat Park.

Rat Park was set up by Alexander and his researchers to represent kind of a rat paradise.  There were other rats, plenty of food, some places to play and raise litters of baby rats — and no one to eat them.  In this environment, the rats thrived.  And when offered opiate-laced concoctions, the rats, for the most part, turned them down — even rats that had been formerly addicted and dumped into Rat Park.  The video below is a great description of both current theories of addiction, as well as Alexander’s alternate theory.  Highly recommended!

Alexander attempted to get his article published in the famous journal Nature, but in the end was rejected.  His original article was published in a smaller journal, Psychopharmacology .  You can read all about it on Wikipedia, as well as Dr. Alexander’s own website.  There’s a lot more to the story, with Alexander’s research on cocaine addiction, that basically backed up the Rat Park results, being suppressed by the World Health Organization after being pressured by the US representatives.

Alexander’s own statement on addiction is below, from his web page, and fascinating in its own right.

Global society is drowning in addiction to drug use and a thousand other habits. This is because people around the world, rich and poor alike, are being torn from the close ties to family, culture, and traditional spirituality that constituted the normal fabric of life in pre-modern times. This kind of global society subjects people to unrelenting pressures towards individualism and competition, dislocating them from social life.

He backs up his thesis that addiction is flourishing from separation in society — of a collapse of what this blog calls Externally Defined Relationships.  Yet at the same time, in this article, testimony to the Canadian Senate, he states that addiction has been in decline since the end of the 19th Century.  It’s plainly obvious that tribal societies have made no great gains in the last century. How can one both appreciate Alexander’s contribution, while at the same time understand why Alexander would make statements that so directly contradict his position?  What makes such obviously erudite individuals make claims that they then contradict?

A Classic Evolution of Understanding

Let’s stop and sum up a little.  Understanding our understanding (meta-understanding!) of addiction requires us to both understand the methods we use for gathering information, the information itself, and the social/relational empathetic structure of the researcher/observer.  We can use the tools in this blog to understand exactly the progression of knowledge — if we can accept that, first, that it IS a progression.  And as with all progressions, there are two v-Meme directions that this progressive understanding can follow.

The first is more familiar to us — horizontal progression.  In the case of most of our ways of understanding, this is a process of refinement of both time and spatial scale, across a given social/relational structure, coupled with the energetics of the measurement.  Nothing exemplifies this more than our understanding of something like the strength of steel.  We start by looking at a hunk of steel, and quantifying its various strengths, elasticities, fracture toughness and such.  Over time, we develop finer and finer tools that enable examination of steel on finer and finer scales.  With electron microscopes, we finally get down to the nano-scale and beyond.  No conflict of social/relational values is immediately present — we mostly stay within the same social/relational, as well as knowledge structures, and we’re more than happy to let scientists in the same v-Meme argue about this at metallurgy meetings.  As long as the steel bridge doesn’t break, then we’re all happy.

Not so much with vertical v-Meme progression.  Now, as our understanding changes, we start having v-Meme conflicts — fundamental, different ways our social/relational structures perceive the same object or issue.  Yet at the same time when these conflicts are generated, if we cannot understand empathetic evolution, our solutions are prone to go memetically backward, to a time when we perceived those problems didn’t exist.  The reality is that it’s hard to know — especially in the case of drug addiction.  But we project away if we have no sense of that evolutionary process.

With drug addiction, as a larger culture, we started out down at the Magical v-Meme.  Flawed individuals use drugs, and deserved whatever they get.  When viewed as a moral failing, after all, and with the incumbent low-empathy level v-Memes, its easy to cast addicts into the Out-group.  They were disconnected from society, anyway.  God tells us what happens to sinners.

Then we evolved — a little.  The Legalistic Authoritarians — famous ones, from Harvard! — got a hold of the problem.  Fragmented Authoritarian social structures are still going to view drug addiction as a flaw of an individual — not the system, because there is little awareness that there is a system.  Authoritarians simply don’t have that level of connectivity in their thinking.  So they set up experiments that modeled how they viewed the problem — largely to confirm their hypotheses.  Low on metacognition, they drew hard boundaries around those individual rats.  They’re rats, after all — no one has proven they have feelings, or are sophisticated social animals.  Then they gave them a choice — morphine, or water.  I personally find it fascinating that the only way the rats’ response is described by these folks is ‘pleasure’ from the morphine — not an attempt to ease their pain, which is, of course, what almost all mammals feel when isolated.  It’s not obvious that they thought of this potential effect– or the larger implications of NOT thinking about this — at all.

And why would they?  We can see the Principle of Reinforcement come into play, with the social structure of the researchers, along with the dispensation of metacognition.  Not only do they still not admit what they don’t know — they burnished their status by supporting large-scale government policy initiatives that have turned entire countries in our world into war zones over this.  Does anyone need reminding about the War on Drugs?

Yet, as odd as it sounds, this was an empathetic progression — an expansion of In-group status to addicts.  Addicts now were declared “not responsible” for their addiction at some level.  Instead of being on the Outside of the social structure, they were allowed provisional acceptance. Treatment was in the hands of professionals, and moral blessing would be applied if the addict would surrender all agency to a 12-Step Program.  This was better than being cast to the curb — though the lack of consequential thinking, and limitations of spatial and temporal scale failed to impress on decision makers.  The people supplying the drugs were now the subject of moral approbation — as long as they were illegal.  They, not the addicts, were sentenced to a lower position on the evolutionary chart — evil men — by the power of the Legalistic Authoritarians.  A new Out Group was formed — and an expanded War was started.

Along comes Dr. Alexander.  It’s hard to know what he originally thought — perhaps he was bothered by the larger status of addicts in society.  But it’s possible that he felt emotional empathy toward the rats in the cages.  Maybe he observed their social order and felt that the whole scenario just wasn’t right — more of a pure legalistic/absolutistic thought.  I’ve actually written to him, and will be interested in his response!  He created his experiment, and attempted to publish his results.

Not surprisingly, the Authoritarians pushed back.  Reliability is the stock in trade in science — the entire university system is constructed around supporting this aspect of the Authoritarian v-Meme.  And Alexander had not just constructed a Rat Park.  He had constructed an empathetic Rat System — an aggregated Collective Rat Intelligence.  Not only had Alexander violated one taboo — saying that a system of actors would influence the agency of an individual.  He also told a non-empathetic community that empathetic connection  was likely the factor that would prevent the problem they had already prescribed with an Authoritarian solution.  He told them that their proposed solution — jails for the Out-Group — all those people selling drugs, wouldn’t make a difference.  And the proposed treatment for the sympathetic In-Group likely wasn’t effective.  The idea that empathetic connection is the critical factor in solving addiction is still unfathomable to most people — and certainly never occurred to the original addiction researchers.

Alexander didn’t give up.  As a progressive change agent, his persistence was in his favor.  By continuing with his work, he gave it more reliability. Alexander went on to write a book on his attempt at not just coming up with a reliable answer — but a valid one as well.

Yet in his book, The Globalization of Addiction, he, too, rails on the v-Memes above his level of processing.  In the passage quoted above, he too downgrades the Performance/Achievement v-Meme.  Without an empathetic evolutionary understanding that there might be a higher level of connectedness possible (a more comprehensive Communitarianism, but not achieved yet!) he falls into the same v-Meme conflict trap.  And at the same time, he ignores his own data regarding population levels of addiction.  Alexander identifies empathetic connection as the key to providing the connection that prevents members of a community from becoming addicts.  But at the same time, he fails to see how that connection manifests outside of already societally and culturally defined relationships that, like it or not, are in decline.  And as anyone from a dysfunctional family can tell you, they have their own set of problems.

Make no mistake — Bruce Alexander should be lauded for his heroic work in exposing so much of current understanding as a myth.  But there are also critical factors that Alexander misses.  One of the major ones is this.  If it is true that empathetic relational formation in systems drives recovery from addiction, or prevents it altogether, we must appreciate that relational disruption, and those anti-empathetic individuals that drive it in relational systems also are a major cause of addiction.  And if we’re serious about controlling addiction and other pathological behaviors, we have to also be serious about understanding how relational disruption works in our families, homes and workplaces.  In the end, it all comes back to empathy.

Mike and Me — Bahia Concepcion, Baja California Sur, Mexico — 1997

Before we move on with our posts on anti-empathetic people, though, let’s talk a little bit about why the Joker is in Gotham City, and how we can learn from the Batman’s example on what to do (or really, not do!) with people that have empathy disorders.  It really boils down to one principle:  Don’t be the Batman.

What is the Batman?  Is the Batman another High Conflict Personality, or empathy-disordered?  No.  At some level, the Batman is the opposite.  The Batman arose as a response to regular crime in Gotham City.  He was working on breaking up the criminal syndicates that had permeated the fabric of Gotham, and at some level, was a Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme evolutionary response to the problems Gotham was having.  The fact that at some level, he is a vigilante on a vendetta, and his alter-ego is millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne is more a reflection of the v-Memes inside the creator’s head.  It may be meaningful, as at some level, since it places Bruce Wayne on a similar, more palatable v-Meme level as the Mob in Gotham, and therefore Batman is extension of both sides’ issues in rising above.  Tough to tell!

But one thing for sure.  The reasons the Joker showed up in Batman’s backyard have little to do with money.  The Joker showed up because Batman was interesting.  He said as much in the famous interrogation scene:

The Joker: [giggling] I don’t, I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You… you… complete me.

The Batman serves as a complementary replacement for part of the Joker’s distorted identity.  And when the Joker ups the heat, the Batman swoops in to escalate the conflict.  Who else can save Gotham City?  But while all the fireworks are going on, no one is asking the longer-time, consequential question:  is Gotham City safer with, or without the Batman?

Understanding how relational disruptors work in systems has been the subject of the last couple of posts.  If you’re the boss, and you have the ability, the best answer with such personality types is just to get rid of them. High Conflict Personalities (HCP)/empathy-disordered people will use resources to process them that would be better off spent toward reaching actual goals.  And the research has shown that there is little that can be done to fix them.

But what if you’re not the boss?  What does “Don’t Be the Batman” look like?  Here are some thoughts.

Don’t be an Absolutistic Personality

There’s no question that absolutistic behavior from people who are targets fuels High Conflict Personalities.  HCP/empathy-disordered people often possess a behavior called ‘splitting’, or black-and-white thinking.  Applied to a target persona with absolutistic behavior, splitting allows the HCP/empathy-disordered to either paint themselves as hero or victim, and allows them a license for split-second impulsive decision making that can create further chaos, while solidifying the HCP/empathy-disordered image of themselves.

Batman’s ostensibly absolute morality (especially when applied to not killing the Joker) fuels the Joker to devise increasingly extreme tests to see if the Batman is serious.  What does this mean?  Rule #1 — keep multiple solutions on the table for any situation.  Don’t provide an absolutistic mirror for the Joker.

EAR — Empathy, Attention and Respect

As we’ve discussed before, the HCP/empathy-disordered do not have any well-structured mode of emotional or higher empathy.  But what they do have is a profound connection with mirroring behavior.  The more excited you become in a situation, you can be sure the more excited they become.  What this means is that you need to be the source of the behavioral mode you want your HCP/empathy-disordered to emulate.  Bill Eddy has a term he emphasizes — EAR. EAR stands for Empathy, Attention and Respect.  When dealing with the HCP, you want to emphasize this mode.  I’ve read most of Bill’s stuff, and he isn’t a structuralist — he mostly emphasizes techniques that work, from his experience.  And the concept of EAR is deeply embedded in almost every religious doctrine — from Buddhism to Christianity.  It’s the sign of yourself being a ‘good person’.  My argument is, though, that this works on a far deeper, organic level.  If you project EAR, the HCP/empathy-disordered individual, not possessing their own EAR modes, are forced to mimic yours.  This absolutely drives them nuts, as they just don’t have the circuits.  So by you using EAR, you’re forcing them to use EAR.  And that’s the most painful thing you can do to them!

Understand Fundamental Attachment Issues

Remember that the HCP/empathy-disordered individual also likely has attachment issues.  For whatever reason, that person can’t form healthy, empathetic relationships with anyone, making them feel alone and isolated, and as discussed before, likely to develop disordered behaviors that help them control their chaotic worldview.  What brings the Joker to Gotham City is to form an attachment to the Batman.  But in order for that to happen, the Joker has to make himself interesting enough to the Batman to get close enough to attach to him.  That involves many of the pre-posted scenes, including sucking himself into the Batman’s former girlfriend’s life, Rachel, to fire up the Batman’s primal desire to protect her.  Needless to say, the only hook that the Joker really has is continuous mayhem.  Not good for Gotham City.

Out of this flows two fundamental principles:  Don’t be a Shiny Thing, and Back Away Slowly!  The Joker is drawn to the Batman in the first place because he offers the Joker a way to get the level of impulsive stimulation the Joker obviously craves.  But the second principle is as important as the first:  in The Dark Knight, the Batman doesn’t become more boring, once the Joker is attached.  Instead, the Batman beats the hell out of the Joker in the jail cell.  That’s a little disruptive attachment for you!  Psychologists call this an attachment injury.  The Joker just got done making his case on how the Batman and him were virtually the same!  And this fuels the Joker even more, to pull his next stunt with the ferry boats!

Community unification and refusal to play

HCPs/empathy-disordered actors are very difficult to beat single-handedly.  Part of the reason is that so many of them are so adept at distorting the truth in a way that is patently believable, yet completely false.  We talked about this a few posts back with the topic of gaslighting.  But over time, this type of behavior gets exposed.  Billy Eddy also discusses this, and recommends documenting behavior over time as a way of outing the HCP.

But the only real way that an HCP/empathy-disordered individual is really shut down is when the entire community refuses to play.  Nothing illustrates this better than the final act of The Dark Knight, when the Joker sets up a boatload of convicts, and a boatload of ordinary citizens on opposite ferry boats, each loaded with explosives, and each with the detonators for the explosives on the others’ boats.  The Joker issues an ultimatum — make a decision about blowing up the other boat before midnight, or the Joker blows both boats up.

It’s the convicts that call a halt to the game, when one elderly black convict, an obvious leader in the group, takes the detonator and throws it into the water.  The boat with the ordinary citizens also picks a leader who refuses to execute the command, though with a little less forceful moral presence.  The viewer is left with a statement about the potential morality of the prison boat that the director, Christopher Nolan, leaves unclear.  Are the convicts really of higher moral order than the regular people on the other boat?  Or do they just understand the psychopath’s mind more completely?  The movie’s penultimate scene ends with the Batman fighting hand-in-hand with the Joker, and saving his life while capturing him.  Batman walks away from a Joker, suspended in mid-air and tied up.  Virtually a guarantee of a sequel — but for reasons you now understand.

What’s the point?  An HCP/empathy-disordered individual can only really be mastered if the whole community refuses to play.  This is extremely difficult to convince a community to do.  Most of Western society has a little communitarian v-Meme in them, and that leads to a belief in change of both parties and an aversion to conflict.  Strong Legalistic v-Memes drive outside observers to a 50/50 split in blame, and an inability to understand the more complex dynamics inherent to an HCP situation.  The Joker himself lays the foundation for others’ thinking by demonizing the Batman, which is aided and abetted by society in general.  The Batman should surrender himself if he doesn’t want other people to die — even though he’s not the one doing the killing.  The Joker pulls others into his orbit where he is low-responsibility.

And so on.  The hard truth is that the community has to look at the facts.  And for whatever reason, decide not to play.

Takeaways:  There’s one basic rule for dealing with HCPs/empathy-disordered individuals.  Don’t be the Batman!!  No absolutistic behavior, don’t be a shiny thing, back away slowly, and get the community behind you.  Face-to-face, it’s gotta be EAR.   Not only will you be a better person, for those stuck in mirroring behavior with an empathy deficit, it’s a brain-scrambler.

Further Reading/Watching:  My favorite TV series of all time is 30 Rock, with Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin.  Most of television consists of emotional manipulation and gaslighting, as well as glorification of actual narcissists (think Scrubs).  30 Rock flips all of this on its head, with the cast of ‘normals’ all being narcissists, and the one tagged narcissist, Alec Baldwin, being the most normal.  What’s also refreshing is that instead of wrapping up the end of every episode with some renormalization of the various personality disorders, the show usually ends with them back in isolation, getting some level of just desserts.

There are classic episodes — but the one that relates the most to this post is Verna (Season 4, Episode 12).  Jack’s advice to narcissistic actress Jenna Maroney on how to deal with her mother — “Say ‘No’.  Talk low.  Let her go.” matches the advice above to a ‘T’.  

On a more serious note, as mentioned earlier, Bill Eddy has a series of books dealing with HCPs.  The books get a little repetitive, but if you pick the one for your situation, they work well.  From an experienced practitioner, Bill’s advice is spot-on.  Highly recommended.

A Moving Sound — Taiwanese Modern Ensemble with Traditional Instruments

One of the things I’ve always maintained is that because of the inherent issues with managing reliability and complexity, China is likely 15-20 years away from selling a world-class commercial airliner.  I’m still standing by that estimate — but this news might make some wonder.  In Al Jazeera today, this was posted:  First China-made passenger jet leaves production line.

The plane, built by COMAC — The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China — is a state-owned enterprise, and the plane is a competitor to the Airbus A320/Boeing 737 lines.  Pre-orders total over 500, but only 10 of these are outside China.  No FAA certification of the aircraft has occurred, so it’s not showing up in the U.S. any time soon.

It’s an interesting coincidence, because I’ve always maintained that the Chinese culture, which is a modified, empathetic form of narcissistic authoritarianism, built on powerful in-group/out-group dynamics (Chinese culture maintains the Han as the master race, and everyone else is not-so-much) would be rocked by the One-Child Policy, which also has recently been modified to a Two-Child Policy.  I always figured that the One-Child Policy would force the products of that policy to then form independent relationships, and drive greater empathetic development, which would then make more complex products possible.  Yet it’s hard to predict exactly what will happen in China — because even though the Chinese government is very much about control, the Internet is the great control leveler.  Even when it’s throttled around, and folks can’t use Facebook.  How much of any of this is China, and how much of it is the new, ascendant global culture?

The plane, the C919, has been delayed from first flight, for reasons no one knows.  That’s not in and of itself surprising — new commercial aircraft are often delayed for a variety of reasons.  What will be interesting to watch is how long the delays last, and where they show up.  China already smartly partnered with GE and France’s Safran for the engines — definitely the hardest part of the game.  That was smart.

But for the remaining parts, it will be interesting for us aerospace watchers to understand what part of the plane game causes the greatest delays — whether it’s airframe or manufacturing.  That’s going to tell us loads about where synergy really matters — in design, or making the thing.  Or perhaps communication and exchange between the two parts.  I’m sure my friends at Boeing are also watching — because it’s going to tell us where we need to double down on understanding and managing complexity.

In the end, the thing to remember is this — it’s complexity management and ease of duplex information flow that creates commercial aircraft.  China’s running an enormous controlled experiment that behooves us all to watch with a true, critical eye.  Running around screaming the sky is falling, or alternately, dismissing their attempts won’t get us very far.  I know I’ll be watching from the sidelines with bated breath!

Wildfire outside Kamiah, Idaho — Braden Pezeshki, Photo

(Just in case you’re new to this blog, I post pictures intended as scenic relief — don’t read too much into it.)

In the last post, we explored some of the manipulation techniques of the Joker, performed unforgettably by Heath Ledger, in the movie The Dark Knight.  The Joker, in this movie, is portrayed as the ultimate psychopath — which in our world of high-performance team formation means that he is THE iconic relational disruptor.  In the last post, we explored how the Joker, instead of wanting to kill the Batman, actually needs the Batman.  The Joker is actually ATTACHED to the Batman, though in a disordered way.  Interaction with the Batman actually helps the Joker construct his own self-image, as well as gets him off.

The Joker also cleverly uses our mental models against us — creating conditions that turn on OUR empathy, which then allows him to create chaos.  I highlighted how the psychopathic mind has a disordered sense of time, which the most clever will use to their advantage.  And how we can’t think like a psychopath (unless we are one).  We can only attempt to predict what they’ll do.

So how can we predict the unpredictable?  The Joker always seems to be one step ahead of the Batman, especially when it comes to initiating events.  So, in many ways, when it comes to superficial, or surface-level actions, you can’t out-guess them. You have to focus on underlying dynamics.

Though there’s got to be a ton more — no claim of exhaustive search or knowledge here — I’m going to talk about three dominant ones today.  These are, in no relevant order:

1.  Social Isolation/Depriving of Agency of a Target.
2. Triangulation of Authority/Target Intersection.
3. Defining the Landscape of Irresponsibility

Let’s go through these, one by one.

Social Isolation

How does an High Conflict Personality (HCP)/empathy-disordered person isolate a target person in a relational system?  There are many ways, but one of the key techniques is using what is called gaslighting.  The standard definition of gaslighting is when the HCP/psychopath makes an individual doubt their own perceptions of a given event in their life.  The Wikipedia definition is actually pretty good.  But it leaves out the relational dynamics which are so important about understanding how relationships are disrupted.

Let’s say you and I have a cup of coffee on Tuesday.  We have a great conversation about a new project, and the event seems relatively agreeable to both parties.  I see you the following day on Wednesday.  “That was a nice cup of coffee we had on Monday, Sue,” I say.  “But Chuck — it was Tuesday.  Remember?”

Now the gaslighting occurs — “Sue — why are you being so difficult? I’m sorry you can’t remember.”  Still feeling the positive experience, you might reach into your purse and pull out your phone.  “See — right here, on Tuesday, Chuck!”  I don’t relent.  “Sue, your phone is all messed up.  Let’s go down to the AT&T store and get that fixed.  I’ll drive you!”  You walk away, disturbed.

Let’s say you’re married.  You go to your husband.  “That guy Chuck,” you say.  “The strangest thing happened at work with him.  We went out for coffee on Tuesday, and had a great exchange on getting this big project going. But when I saw him again today (Wednesday), he said we actually met on Monday.”

What your partner is likely to say is this:  “Are you sure you just didn’t mishear him?”  You resist and protest.  “No, I’m sure…”  — but are you really?

The most pernicious gaslighters don’t do anti-social things, like inappropriate behavior that could readily be called out.  They do ordinary things that distort reality — and here’s the relational system edge.  They use things that deprive you of the fundamental empathetic grounding that occurs when we coordinate our activities with other people.  It’s not surprising, for example, that I use the time for a coffee conversation.  Who would expect that as an avenue for control?

Let’s say I see you again, and a similar situation occurs.  How likely are you to go talk to your partner about it?  I’d argue, unless you have a way to explain it (and now you do!) you’re very unlikely to even bring up problems with me with your partner.  Because it makes you look crazy.  And that starts the process of social isolation that will enable me — the HCP/psychopath/gaslighter — to grab control of your grounding circuits.  Which means that I’ll soon be able to assert abusive control.

Narcissistic leaders do this too — by gaslighting their own performance, or more typically, by praising one employee or a group uber alles.  HCPs/psychopaths often do this cleverly in groups by working with various ratios of teams, by coddling, say, 1/3 of a team, while punishing the other 2/3s. Often, the HCP/psychopath will pick the people out who are either most susceptible to control, or other HCPs like themselves and reward them, keeping their allegiance tight (remember what Machiavelli said about holding your friends close, and your enemies closer!) and punishing the rest, because they know that their histrionic friends will be quick to defend them, while the other, more healthy people will become depressed, and are much less likely to protest the dominant order.

Triangulation of Authority

There are literally hundreds of permutations of this standard conflict scheme, but it is much more commonly used by HCPs/psychopaths where large institutions are in play.  Anonymous complaint processes are rife for this kind of abuse as well.  Here, the HCP/psychopath makes an accusation against the target to an authority about an indeterminate act — one that there is no clear evidence for, but obviously transgresses social mores.  The authority is compelled to act against the accused. The end result is that the HCP steps out of the triangle after the accusation, and then lets the accused deal solely with the authority.  The accused is usually faced with an either/or situation — accept the false accusation as true, and negotiate with the authority, or fight with the authority, which usually has much greater resources than the accused.

Another Triangulation technique often used by HCPs is an innocent bystander is triangulated into the system, taken hostage as it were, and then an untenable situation is created for the HCP’s real target.  The target is then placed in a position of judgment whether the innocent is going to be hurt or spared, with blame and responsibility centered on the target.  The HCP doesn’t necessarily have to limit themselves to one target — in the following scene, the Joker sets up two ferry boats full of people as his ‘social experiment’, one of ordinary citizens, and one filled with convicts, each rigged with explosives, and with each holding the detonator.  The Joker gives both a deadline of midnight to figure out if they’re going to blow up the other boat, with the threat that he’ll do it if they don’t.  Classic triangulation/relational disruption!

The Landscape of Irresponsibility

One of the arguments made for making sure everyone has a title in a team is that responsibilities are clear-cut, and that ought to improve efficiency.  But there is also no more fertile ground for irresponsibility than the creation of titles.  And particularly when there are HCPs/psychopaths in play.  When one wants to manipulate the people on your team, one of the primary tools is the Landscape of Irresponsibility.

What does that landscape look like?  A given project or situation is mapped out so that the HCP has no responsibility other than pointing out that he/she is not responsible.  And they do this in compelling ways — in the above scene from the Joker’s Social Experiment, either boat is set up to be responsible for blowing up the other boat.  In the execution of both Harvey Dent and his fiancée, the Joker is once again not responsible.  And on it goes.  Creation of fragmented effort offers tons of opportunities for finger-pointing, as well as relational disruption in teams.  And a good leader can spot a victim/blamer, creating the seeds for this kind of chaos, a mile away.

————–

If there is any scene that sums all of these up, it’s the following scene of Batman interrogating the Joker in the jail cell.  So here’s your pop quiz — can you identify the three disruption strategies at work in this final clip?

Further Reading:  One of the great canards is that the Joker is psychotic, as opposed to being a psychopath.  It’s the ultimate piece of gaslighting, but one that unfortunately probably informs too many people’s ideas on mental health in this country.  This article, written about a psychiatrist, Vasilis K. Pozios, M.D, who analyzes comic book criminals for fun and speaks at Comic-cons, is well worth the read on both the Joker and this phenomenon.

Heath Ledger as The Joker, from the movie “The Dark Knight” directed by Christopher Nolan  — posted under Fair Use

If there is any character in contemporary film that completely models a High Conflict Personality/empathy-disordered individual, it is the portrayal of the Joker by Heath Ledger in the movie “The Dark Knight”.  In fact, the portrayal was so accurate, it screwed Ledger up so much that he didn’t survive the role.    A sleeping disorder, described by Ledger as an inability to quiet his mind (just a guess — but he decalibrated his sense of time so much by playing a psychopath, it was impossible for him to regain control) led to an interaction overdose accident.

The Joker as a character is portrayed in the movie as a man with no documented past.  He comes to Gotham City solely to mess with the Protagonist — Batman.  In his own words, during an interrogation by the Batman, the Joker says:

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?

The Joker: [giggling] I don’t, I don’t want to kill you! What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No. You… you… complete me.

Watch here:

There is the crux — the Joker, stuck down in Mirroring Behavior, can’t get The Juice out of life unless he has a mirror image that is as powerful, or more so than himself.  But that doesn’t mean that he has to confess to that early in the movie.  In the first scene with the Mob in Gotham, he says something entirely different:

Why does The Joker in one scene say “Kill the Batman” and at the same time demand money from the Mob in order to do it?  This is a perfect example of egocentric v-Meme borrowing from his audience.  While he may have no real interest in seeing the Batman dead, he knows the Mob does.  Equally as well, he knows the Mob won’t believe him if he offers to do it for free.  He has to tell them he wants money — enough to make them hurt — if he wants credibility.  In a twisted way, he is using Rational Empathy to connect to his audience using the v-Memes that they understand.

This scene also displays another point I’ve made in past posts about high-level psychopaths.  They have an incredible ability to read everyone in the room.  He looks at the TV, at Lau, the member in Hong Kong, and calls him out:  “I know the squealers when I see them.. ”

One of my favorite scenes is the scene below with Harvey Dent in the hospital.  The Joker breaks in, right before blowing up the hospital, for a conversation with Harvey, who now has half his face burned off, and is now known as Two-Face.  Harvey accuses the Joker of having a plan — and the Joker famously replies:

Harvey Dent: Your men. Your plan.

The Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it! You know, I just… *do* things.

He follows with the best explanation of relational disruption in a movie I’ve seen:

The Joker: I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hmmm? You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!

[Joker hands Two-Face a gun and points it at himself]

The Joker: Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair!

[still holding the gun, Two-Face pauses and takes out his coin]

Two-Face: [showing Joker the good side] You live.

The Joker: Mm-hmm.

Two-Face: [showing the scarred side] You die.

The Joker: Mmm, now we’re talking.

More than anything else, this clip shows that the Joker, even though he is anti-empathetic, is a master of empathetic reasoning, moving up and down the Spiral at will.  He understands exactly the Authoritarian/Legalistic system that he’s interacting with — and how to make everyone in it crazy.  Another amazing aspect of this scene, though, is showing the disordered and collapsed sense of time the Joker possesses.  At the end, when he presses the gun up against his own forehead, the Joker is making a profound statement about extent of time that matters.  He’s collapsed all of his desires into one, impulsive moment.

The Joker engages in v-Meme borrowing as well in the following two scenes.  In the first, the Joker is in with one of the Mob guys that wants to kill him.  Here’s the dialogue:

The Joker: You wanna know how I got these scars? My father, was a drinker, and a fiend. And one night, he goes off crazier than usual. Mommy gets the kitchen knife to defend herself. He doesn’t like that. Not. One. Bit. So, me watching, he takes the knife to her, laughing while he does it. He turns to me and says, “Why so serious?” Comes at me with the knife. “WHY SO SERIOUS?” He sticks the blade in my mouth… “Let’s put a smile on that face.” And…

[glancing at thug]

The Joker: Why so serious?

When the audience first sees this scene, their thoughts immediately jump to empathetic connection.  We are poised to think “Wow — I totally understand the Joker.  His dad, tortured and killed his mother with a knife.  That kind of trauma would turn ANYONE into a psychopathic killer.   ”  The Joker is leading us, with our own mental models of how someone might become a killer, not only to empathetically connect with him, but to sympathize with him.  Here’s the scene:

Not only can we understand the Joker, but we relate to his experience.  We engage in rational and emotional empathy!

But then, a short while later in the movie, we have this scene:

The Joker: Oh, you look nervous. Is it the scars? You want to know how I got ’em?

[He grabs Rachel’s head and positions the knife by her mouth]

The Joker: Come here. Hey! Look at me. So I had a wife. She was beautiful, like you. Who tells me I worry too much. Who tells me I ought to smile more. Who gambles and gets in deep with the sharks. One day, they carve her face. And we have no money for surgeries. She can’t take it. I just want to see her smile again. I just want her to know that I don’t care about the scars. So… I stick a razor in my mouth and do this…

[the Joker mimics slicing his mouth open with his tongue]

The Joker: …to myself. And you know what? She can’t stand the sight of me! She leaves. Now I see the funny side. Now I’m always smiling!

From a v-Meme perspective, the Joker is, at a minimum, forcing the audience in the cocktail party to accept him as an individual, playing off communitarian sensibilities.  In fact, it could be the Joker is presenting himself in even a more profound role — that of a self-aware criminal!

But here’s the rub — every act of transference that occurs from the audience is reversed in the movie.  And here is the key — if you’re not a psychopath, you likely can’t  think like one.  That is not the way to manage your relationships with them.  What to do?  Believe it or not, the Buddhists have the best answer.  When I originally posted this, I thought we could get through understanding the Joker in one post.  But that’s not the case.  We’ll get to those Buddhists.  But we have a little more exploration to do with the Joker.

Takeaways:  The Joker is the iconic psychopath.  With some aggregate of functional timescales, ranging from the pure impulsive, to the long-term plan, the disordered mind of the Joker keeps everyone guessing.  His most powerful weapon, though, is distortion of the mental models and assumptions that others believe to be the case.  The best weapon against the Joker?  Well-reasoned collection of data, and rational thought.  Because when you’re dealing with the Joker, you need to remember that no one’s going to be better at using your own mental models, supplemented by your own confirmation bias against you and your team.

Friends flyfishing — North Fork of the Clearwater, Idaho

So how do High Conflict People/the empathy disordered function inside of relational structures?  Not surprisingly, there are a range of behaviors and strategies.  Much depends on the v-Meme structure of the organization.  Since HCPs/empathy disordered individuals are centered squarely in the Authoritarian v-Meme, it’s not surprising that such an individual would conform well, and do well in such an environment.  If everything were set up around self-interest, with little expectation of coordination, and the only measure of judgment were obedience, certain characteristics, such as not feeling anyone else’s pain, as well as the ability to read everyone in the room, would accelerate such an individual’s rise to the top.

Lower than the Authoritarian v-Meme, the HCP/empathy disordered individual is likely to be killed, or be a killer.  Jared Diamond, in his book, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, discusses in-depth the higher prevalence of violence in tribal societies.  My suspicions are that at least some of this is due to individually delivered retributive justice due to non-existent feedback mechanisms for punishment for crimes, as well as a lack of social organization and lower level aggregate empathetic development.  That’s a fancy way of saying “Someone pisses you off, you just kill them, cuz you know the Po-Po ain’t gonna bust your ass.”  But these are extremely controversial issues, and outside the scope of this book.  But if you have to have a story that really contrasts these issues in tribal society, there’s likely none better than Farley Mowat’s People of the Deer.  It shows both the inter-tribal dynamics I discuss — as well as the point I’ve made repeatedly — don’t moralize about your empathetic position up the Spiral.  Who’s doing the real destruction?

An interesting aside is that from one set of not-valid-enough-to-be-publishable simulations a post-doc of mine did showed that relational disruption at any level below the top tended to increase the productivity of lower v-Meme organizations.  This is not surprising.  Organizations focused on power and control really aren’t designed to produce anyway.  And stirring things up likely will lead to some change in practice.  Having a psychopath might be good for your straitjacketed company, in a weird way. At least things will be exciting!

Where relational disruptors really start to be felt is in organizations that are performance-driven and rely on trust as part of the data stream that such organizations need to create coherence.  There, such individuals, without the external definition of an organizational chart, can wreak havoc with various strategies for gaining power, control and excitement.  But how do they do it?

The way to understand relational disruption is to go back to the Spiral and understand regression of any culture down the Spiral.  As we discussed before, if a leader is a progressive leader, then that leader will typically be one v-Meme above the population he/she is trying to lead.  Additionally, that person will be creating and diversifying relationships among their subordinates, as well granting appropriate agency for them to form their own relationships.  The opposite is true for relational destruction, and the schemes of the HCP/empathy-disordered will typically play on aspirational visions in an organization in order to triangulate individuals into conflict.  What’s the short version?  Borrow from the top of empathetic behaviors, twist them, and then use them against folks lower down.

Let’s boil this down a little so that it becomes a little clearer.  In a solid Legalistic v-Meme organization, an HCI/empathy-disordered individual will typically use rules for control (Authoritarian v-Meme below), as opposed to the progressive individual, which will use rules for improving performance.  They may appoint someone subordinate in the hierarchy below them to be the ‘hatchet man’, so they can defer responsibility when it comes to execution of said rules.  That allows them to maintain status in spite of the social conflict generated.

In a Performance-based Community, a leader looking for control may use false communitarian modes, asking everyone for input, regardless of relevance.  Or worse, an individual inside an organization might have had to make a decision based on some time-dependent decision point.  The HCP/empathy-disordered may then accuse that person, if the decision doesn’t agree with them, of not upholding community standards in the decision-making process.  This causes the person to be in apparent conflict with community standards, until the data behind the action is revealed.  Such upheaval, though, leaves a taste of distrust in everyone’s mouth.  If accused, there had to be some legitimacy, right?

All of the above is one heckuva word salad.  And as I said earlier, there is no comprehensive book or study on relational disruptors in social networks.  But there are incredible portrayals in the arts. That’s the subject of the next post.

Takeaways:  It’s a word salad when it comes to talking about disruption.  But here are the basics.  Someone wanting to mess with your organization does so with your messages, and using the authority/v-Meme structures in your organization to triangulate them against you.  That way, you’re fighting the fundamental fiber of your operation.

Further Reading:  Probably apocryphal, but totally on the money.  A classic — by one of the greatest politicians/psychopaths/champions of all time.  Not everyone that is empathy-disordered is chronically evil.  Some are just looking for the juice!

Hells Canyon, Idaho/Montana Border

Understanding the Anti-Empathetic on a structural basis is challenging — mostly because the ones we run into at work may, for the most part, seem just fine, most of the time.  There’s a distortion in much of the web content, as well as some of the psychological literature, that people suffering empathy disorders, or High Conflict People (HCPs), as Bill Eddy describes, are always out to lunch.  I remember seeing a video posted on a psychological diagnosis website describing Narcissistic Personality Disorder –whatever that exactly means — remember that even the insurance companies a la the DSM V can’t come to a consensus.  The actor displayed happened to be a woman, and she was wildly unlikable.  No one, upon encountering such a person, would ever listen to them.  But that is absolutely not the way they regularly roll.  HCPs/empathy-disordered people are often very charismatic.  And some are quite famous.

There are reasons for the distortion of image.  One is that much of the psychological research on personality disorders are done on people in prison populations — not the ones loose in the world.  The second is that there are no truly effective treatment modalities.  Aside from some modest gains with techniques like Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), which was invented by a self-admitted personality disordered researcher — Dr. Marsha Lineham at the University of Washington — there’s not much out there.  And there’s not likely to be much in the future.  People with empathy disorders tend not to think they need treatment, or that there’s anything wrong with them.  When they have a problem or conflict, they think there’s something wrong with you.  As such, they tend not to go to psychologists.

And then there are problems in understanding how they interact with the people tasked to study them — namely psychologists.  My observations have been based on systems theory — connecting things together.  If you ascribe to the theories in this blog, that social/relational systems create the way different communities think, there are few communities that are as heavily legalistic as the psychology community.  Only small offshoots of the community delve deeply into connection issues (family systems therapy comes to mind), and the field has been slow to work its way out of gender stereotypes of the different personality disorders — which once again, are a reflection of the knowledge structure produced by the social structure of psychologists!

If you’re having a hard time swallowing this, I do understand.  But examine your own thought in the following scenario.  You are depressed.  You are sitting in your therapist’s office.  You tell the therapist:  “I am depressed.”  The therapist says to you “now XXX, who’s in charge of your happiness?”  What do you impulsively answer?

If you’re a typical American, we all know the answer.  You’re almost 100% likely to answer “I am.  I am in charge of my happiness.”  Yet we all know intrinsically that this is simply not the case all of the time.  Sometimes we are — but sometimes we are locked in a system with an abuser.  And if that abuser is of the chronic variety, odds are they have an empathy disorder — or are a High Conflict Individual.

How then to understand these people?  The conclusions that follow are my own — but at some level, I want to make sure I make perfectly clear that I lean on my external definition 🙂 — I am an engineering professor — not a professional, certified psychologist.  I’ve read widely, but I am sure not completely.  So this is my informed take.

High Conflict Personalities (HCPs), especially when activated, reside primarily in the Authoritarian/Egocentric v-Meme.  It is not clear that they really possess any other intrinsic behavior other than what serves them.  But they have a tremendous ability to use Mirroring Behavior to blend in.  What does that mean?

Like everyone, HCPs have two primary relationships with self.  One is Externally Defined — what culture, organization, and in general, the outside world think of themselves.  For this, HCPs are extremely sensitive — in fact, there is a case to be made that they are hyper-sensitive.  This hyper-sensitivity may come from hypervigilance — basically a sense of constant arousal and awareness to threats.  Hypervigilance, and the anxiety associated with it, may be a forcing function that creates the empathy-disordered mind.  If one is hypervigilant, it means that someone’s temporal and spatial scaling is constantly activated, and as a result, temporal scales essentially collapse inside the individuals’ head.

Hypervigilance often comes from a trauma background, and is often associated with PTSD.  But trauma alone does not explain the complete profile of the empathy-disordered.  There is likely a genetic component, and this is poorly understood.  For those interested, do look up Simon Baron-Cohen’s work.  HCPs and the empathy disordered also likely have symptoms of what is called an attachment disorder —  an inability to attach, or form appropriate empathetically based relationships with primary figures in life during childhood.  I believe (and maybe someone’s beat me to this thought!) that this results in poorly formed ego boundaries.  This has profound consequences in how the HCP/empathy-disordered individual moves about the world.

How does all of this work?  The HCP/empathy-disordered individual lives in a world of poorly defined self.  In many ways, their Independent Relationship with their self is in shambles. And since that poorly defined self has poorly defined boundaries, the person is not able to discriminate between themselves and the outside world in any instantaneous mode.  When you fold in a phenomenon such as hypervigilance, where they feel constantly under threat, they adapt.  But the way they adapt is to develop mechanisms of control — it’s control uber alles.  

How they develop those strategies then depends on the Survival v-Meme assets that individual has.  For someone who is physically attractive, it’s not surprising that they would develop traits associated with narcissism.  For someone like Josef Stalin, small in stature and with a pockmarked face and uncharismatic  personality, it is again not surprising that they would develop more direct methods of control.

Regardless, the fundamentals of empathetic development cannot be avoided.  The collapsed sense of independent self leads to a collapsed sense of independent time. While appearing to be a liability, also serves as an asset — the HCP/empathy-disordered can shift time in their head at will, without conscience.  Lack of boundaries also manifests themselves in varying ways.  Something that gives them pleasure is there for their taking — it’s not really separate from them anyway.  Social conventions, if not explicitly enforced, are something the HCP/empathy-disordered can use at their liking.  There is no internal feedback loop that constrains behavior.  Ever try to conceive how a child molester, an extreme manifestation of these types of behaviors, justifies their behavior?

The key to understanding, though, lies in the well-developed Mirroring Behavior function in the empathy pyramid.  In many ways, deficits in other areas of empathetic development are exaggerated as surplus quantities in this level.  For the HCP/empathy-disordered, hypervigilance becomes an asset.  A true, high functioning HCP/empathy-disordered individual can walk into a room of people and immediately know what those people want to hear.  And not worry if what they tell them is utter B.S.  Lying doesn’t affect them internally — because there is no internal ‘there’ there.  It is merely one more tool in the toolbox.

The lack of boundaries also serves as an asset.  HCPs can distort and lie willfully, even when the truth may be easily accessible. It’s not surprising that various CEOs have been accused of being psychopaths.  Many of the advantages associated with disassociated temporal and spatial scale processing have advantages in the business world of today.

There is deep cultural knowledge of these types of personalities, contained in myth.  One of my favorites is the vampire.  What does a vampire see when he (or she) looks in the mirror?  Nothing, of course — what could be a better paradigm for a collapse of independent definition?  And how does a vampire dress (always in a tuxedo)?  Remember that daylight (exposure to scrutiny) will make the vampire wither and die.  When presented like this, it’s pretty obvious that the archetype comes from aggregated cultural knowledge of narcissists — not some creepy dude in Transylvania.

It should be noted that there are degrees of empathy disordered.  Not every person that has some level of anti-empathy is completely unhinged, and some can be reached with epiphany during crisis.  But for those real Princes and Princesses of Darkness,  realize that they are only constrained by immediate external scrutiny.  And that’s terrifying.

Takeaways:  HCPs/empathy disordered suffer from core empathetic deficiency — a distorted and typically collapsed sense of time and space.  This leads to extreme egocentric/Authoritarian v-Meme behavior, and a strong desire to control.  Some of this may be caused by an attachment disorder — a early childhood failure to attach to appropriate authority/parents.  Trauma can also lead to this type of behavior, turning hyperawareness/hypervigilance from a liability to an asset.  Poorly separated through appropriate ego boundaries, and knowing no inner peace because of it, the HCP/empathy-disordered person works to control their world with the talents and tools available to them.

Dead Salmon, Lolo Creek, Clearwater National Forest, Idaho

One of the challenges when discussing bad leadership — or even disordered leadership–  is that it’s, quite obviously, a sensitive subject.  And the person one is accusing in being a bad leader typically doesn’t like it.  So I’ve decided to take a different tack.

Let’s discuss whom I call ‘The Big Three’ — the seminal tyrants from the mid 20th century.  All three did things that were, in short, amazing.  And all three did things that, regardless of the amazing things they did, turned out to be ultimately terribly destructive for the countries they led.

Who are the Big Three?  Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.  What is interesting to me is that each member of The Big Three embodied the manipulation forms of three of the most dominant negative personality-disordered leadership styles.  Stalin was a cold-blooded psychopath.  Hitler was histrionic.  And Mao was a narcissist-to-end-all-narcissists.

Stalin — Anti-social Personality Disorder

The story below is likely apocryphal, but it is widespread — I copied it off this website:

When Josef Stalin was on his deathbed he called in two likely successors, to test which one of the two had a better knack for ruling the country. He ordered two birds to be brought in and presented one bird to each of the two candidates.

      The first one grabbed the bird, but was so afraid that the bird could free himself from his grip and fly away that he squeezed his hand very hard, and when he opened his palm, the bird was dead.     

Seeing the disapproving look on Stalin’s face and being afraid to repeat his rival’s mistake, the second candidate loosened his grip so much that the bird freed himself and flew away.

      Stalin looked at both of them scornfully. “Bring me a bird!” he ordered.  They did.

      Stalin took the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, he plucked all the feathers from the bird’s little body.

      Then he opened his palm. The bird was laying there naked, shivering, helpless.  Stalin looked at him, smiled gently and said, “You see .. and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm.”

Josef Stalin was a classic Anti-social Personality Disordered Psychopath.  He was not known as a particularly charismatic speaker.  He did, however, establish a centralized command economy in the Soviet Union, while modernizing the economy — effectively moving the Soviet Union out of an agrarian economy, imprisoned millions in the Gulags in the Far East/Siberia, as well as starving at least 10 million people in the Ukraine during the Holodomor.  Stalin is interesting as a disordered leadership paradigm insofar as he embodies a very pure Authoritarian v-Meme.  Enemies were not only shot.  They were famously erased from photographs.  As an example, embodying the psychological distortion known as gaslighting, Stalin had his head of secret police, Nikolai Yezhov, arrange for purging all the old Bolsheviks as part of the original revolution, then turned on Yezhov himself and had him executed as well.

Stalin is a great example of the overwhelming weaknesses, as well as marginal strengths of pure Authoritarian systems.  On the one hand, Stalin (as well as the Russian winter) resisted the Nazis’ invasion during Operation Barbarossa, and turned the tide of WWII.  On the other hand, the dramatic failure and collapse of production and productivity during the various collectivization campaigns run inside the Soviet Union should give any Executive Board pause when dealing with a CEO that says things like ‘I need absolute power to run a tight ship.’

Stalin displayed many elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder as well — but he primarily operated through control of resources, fear and terror.  He made others dependent on his system, while simultaneously ruthlessly killing or starving anyone that got in his way.   Yet the cold-blooded manipulation of truth inside the system, while aggregating economic as well as political power inside the Soviet Union serves as an exemplar of how to terrorize an entire continent.

The main characteristics of the ASD leader are:  unremitting commitment to control; use of fear and dependency to enforce allegiance;  and cold-blooded cruelty to transmit the message that there are no boundaries that are sacred.

Hitler — the Histrionic

So much has been written about Hitler, there’s little I can say in a few sentences that can add to the record.  The reason he is listed, with the fear of invoking/violating Godwin’s Law, is that there is little question that Hitler was one helluva motivational speaker.  Inevitably, though, his speeches would follow an arc whereby he would claim a.) Germans had been victimized by Jews, b.) blame external enemies for any fault, and c.) the only way for Germans to redeem themselves from the past was to follow him — which they did.  Hitler was also extremely fatalistic in his long-term analysis of any efforts to build the 1000 year Reich — it was all supposed to go to ruin anyway.  In fact, in this essay (one of my all-time favorites) Lee Sandlin makes the point that Hitler used to sit around with Adolph Speer, his chief architect, contemplating the ‘ruin value’ of his works.

The key takeaway from Hitler’s characteristics is his potent distortion using Victim/Blaming/Condemned Hero strategies that allow unification of a group of people behind him.  Even though fantastic, the strategy, coupled with historic patterns in German culture — not just anti-Semitism, but Hitler’s ability to tap into Germans’ deep connection with a magical past — helped manipulate a downtrodden people at the end of a period of intense economic desperation.  It’s no surprise that Hitler’s favorite operas were written by Richard Wagner.  Hitler even allegedly swore on Wagner’s grave, in 1923, to maintain the performance venue of Bayreuth as the only place Wagner’s famous Grail redemption opera, Parsifal, could be performed.  In many ways, it was Hitler’s mastery of borrowing the power of myth and deep story that gave him power to manipulate an entire country into mass murder, and their own destruction.

Mao Zedong — The Narcissist

There can be a healthy debate among historians on who was the worst of the Three Great Tyrants.  But there is no question that Mao gives the other two a run for their money.  Not only did Mao control, dominate and murder hundreds of millions of people, but he also ran experiments on entire populations inside his own country.  Where Hitler had some level of In-group/Out-group separation, however execrable, inside Mao’s China, everything was fair game.  It is true that if Mao favored anyone, he at some level gave lip service to the peasant class.  But with his authority, groups like Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc on the entire population, and drove large-scale relational destruction and social re-integration through campaigns where intellectuals were sentenced to peasant camps and mass redistribution and destruction of cultural property was also the norm.

Though there were other large-scale campaigns perpetrated by Mao, most people have heard of the Cultural Revolution, where Mao destroyed the universities and killed close to 3 million people.  During the Cultural Revolution, Mao, through forced relocation, and campaigns like the Four Olds and the Four News, systematically replaced centuries of Chinese tradition with what is known in the psychological literature as narcissistic supply directed at him — termed Mao Zedong Thought.  Mao demanded and programmed such levels of thought in the populace that even simple utterances, like “Sweet potato tastes good” became popular slogans with the Chinese peasantry.  In the end, Mao demanded the thought control of a god.

Yet at the same time, there are indisputable figures and indicators during Mao’s reign of terror that in aggregate, the lot of many, or perhaps most of China’s citizens improved.  Life expectancy increased from 35 in 1949, to 63 by 1975.  In many ways, China pre-Mao was frozen in time, and falling further and further behind the West.  Mao, through a catastrophic program of narcissistic relational disruption, in many ways altered the social structure of a nation that had been stuck in a Magical/Authoritarian v-Meme for 2000 years, and created the environment for China’s current rush toward modernity.  It is difficult to know (and not the point of this blog) or to judge Mao’s larger legacy.

The key takeaway from Mao’s efforts in an effort to understand disordered leadership is this:  the Narcissist, through a combination of external terror and the constant drumbeat of self-aggrandizement, coupled with the demands for leadership worship, creates a Black Hole effect around the population they manage.  Everyone looks toward that leader that can alternately be charismatic or cruel, and are drawn into their orbit.  The goal of such a leadership style is a collapse of personal boundaries and agency, with that inculcated passivity ending with the individuals being drawn over the Event Horizon of the culture created.  Coherent action in the population is created through an infinite fragmentation of other relational networks — no one has any other binding relationship that exceeds the relationship with the leader.  And while this can create patterns of coherence greater than the other two styles — Psychopath and Histrionic — in the end, cognitive and intellectual diversity are fundamentally destroyed.  And this leads, in the long-term, to a collapse in creativity, as well as upward information flow in the system.  In the end, such behavior is self-defeating.  Because no one can think completely for an organization — or a nation.

Takeaways:  The Three Tyrants of the 20th century can offer iconic perspectives on anti-empathetic leadership.  Stalin, with ASD, shows the power of unrelenting fear and terror,  social dislocation, and economic control in creating broad-scale passivity that, in the end, dramatically effected the economic productivity of an entire part of the world.  Most important of Stalin’s legacy was the collapse of peer-level trust in Eastern Europe, as well as the Soviet Union.  

Hitler demonstrates the power of what we call v-Meme borrowing — the borrowing of deep, resonant stories from people’s backgrounds for the purpose of manipulation.  As an exemplar of a Histrionic personality disorder, he also successfully used the Victim/Blaming/Condemned Hero triad as a way to garner sympathy and gather control over supporters.

More than any of the above, Mao shows the power of the narcissist.  He took hundreds of millions of people, and through the constant drumbeat of self-aggrandizement, infinitely fragmented millions of relationships and made them focus solely on him.  As a master relational disruptor, he took China’s iconic reverence for scholars and intellectuals, and turned this into class-based rage that resulted in the deaths of millions, and the destruction of an enormous part of China’s cultural heritage.  The creation of coherence through subordination has created an empathetic relational crisis, and through that, a creativity crisis, that modern China is only beginning to recover from today.