psychology – Page 132

Stockholm Syndrome and Modern Society

Victims of Stockholm Syndrome might be a lot more common than is usually appreciated

44 years ago, two Swedish bank robbers took four hostages during a failed robbery attempt at the Kreditbanken in Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm. Although the robbers kept the hostages for six days and forced them to endure psychological torture, the hostages declined to testify against the robbers when freed and even went as far as raising money for their defence. This phenomenon gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome“.

The psychological literature defines Stockholm Syndrome as “strong emotional ties that develop between two persons where one person intermittently harasses, beats, threatens, abuses, or intimidates the other.” It appears to have similarities to battered wife syndrome and to learned helplessness, and is otherwise known as “capture bonding”.

This phenomenon appears strange to neutral onlookers because the expected emotional consequence of subjecting someone to the trauma of being taken hostage is hatred. Because one loses one’s ability to move and talk freely on pain of being shot dead, it could reasonably be expected that a hostage would feel, at first, fear and anger, and then hatred.

Stockholm Syndrome doesn’t only occur in cases of botched robberies. The specific phenomenon is probably related to behaviour that naturally occurs in dominance hierarchies – in other words, Stockholm Syndrome is a manifestation of a specific submissive strategy that probably had frequent application in the brutal biological past of the human species.

For the vast majority of the history of the human species there have been no laws, and nothing even approaching a justice system. The first ever code of laws is thought to have been introduced by the Babylonian King Hammurabi almost 4,000 years ago, which means that for 96%+ of our existence the only thing that passed for justice was what you were physically capable of beating out of other people with your fists.

Because humans are a social species, this environment of easy violence meant that a large range of behaviours relating to how to show aggression and how to show submission evolved over time. Of course, many of these behaviours would have evolved long before humans ever became a separate species, and many of them are so old that their expression is more subconscious and instinctual than a deliberate attempt to manipulate.

Stockholm Syndrome is similar to the phenomenon of learned helplessness, in which a creature that has been brutalised without hope of escape for long enough comes to “learn” that no escape is possible, and can consequently fail to take an opportunity to escape when one does arise. In this sense it could also be considered similar to clinical depression.

What most people don’t realise is that we, the people of modern Western societies, have also been brutalised into submission by our own ruling classes, and so badly that our relations to them are akin to a hostage with Stockholm Syndrome towards their captor. In the middle of an election campaign – as we can see all around us – it’s possible to observe the abject state of emotional submission to which the populace has been reduced.

This is partially achieved by the kind of sadism that is common in primary school students. Like Winston Smith in 1984, who had a form of Stockholm Syndrome deliberately inculcated in him by the sadistic O’Brien, we have been meticulously brutalised by a control system that has had 5,000 years to perfect its tactics for manipulating the peasantry.

From childhood we are forced to get up early in the morning so that we can be most efficiently conditioned into a life of factory work. Anyone who has not received enough sleep by this time, for whatever reason, is severely punished. Absolute submission to authority is rewarded, on a daily basis, for over a decade, and all instances of failure to submit are punished mercilessly.

After a decade, it’s generally assumed that the brains of the victims have been tenderised enough for the teachers to hand us over to the employers, with whom we remain until it’s time to throw us on the scrapheap.

If at any time during this period of servitude we get the idea that we would like to smoke a medicinal flower to take some pain away, or to take some magic mushrooms in order to bring us closer to God, then members of a group of enforcers specially chosen for their willingness to follow orders will come and put us in a cage with rapists and murderers.

It will not be possible to reason with this enforcer class. One cannot argue, for example, that this enforcer class has no right to put you in a cage for simply trying to heal yourself physically, emotionally or spiritually. If you resist you will be attacked, and if you continue to resist you will be killed.

Neither can one count on the support of your fellows to resist such laws. The vast majority of the people has been conditioned to bow their heads and shrug their shoulders when they hear stories about the crimes that the enforcer class have committed against them. Ideologies of freedom, like anarcho-homicidalism, are mocked and rejected.

Such arbitrary laws, against medicines and sacraments that have been used by humans since before the Code of Hammurabi, can only have the effect of demoralising the people who fall under their whip.

Most of the people who don’t find the current state of affairs appalling are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, where they are the hostages and the ruling class are the captors. Essentially they are those who have been brutalised so hard that they have lost all will to resist and can be directed by the ruling class as easily as sheep can be led to slaughter.

We can see them being led to the voting booths right now in order to show their consent to the whole ghastly procedure. Here we can see that the emotionally mutilated citizenry will not only cast a vote in favour of the Establishment that mutilated them, they will also cast a vote to give that Establishment permission to emotionally mutilate their children too.

That a random person suffers from Stockholm Syndrome is not the exception but the iron-fast rule in our modern societies.

Writing the Narcissist

Portraying believable narcissistic characters in your creative writing poses a set of challenges that are similar to those posed by writing psychopathic ones. This is because both types of characters are extremely selfish, but there are many differences nonetheless. This article looks at the typical qualities of the narcissist so that a creative writer can most realistically portray such a character.

In that the narcissist is arrogant, self-absorbed and exploitative they are similar to the psychopath. Where they are different is that the psychopath seems dead inside to those that really know them, whereas the narcissist is full of emotions and life.

For example, narcissists are highly prone to strong feelings of envy. If the protagonist of your story achieved a major personal milestone, and received adulation from all around them, this could be the plot point that drove a secondary narcissist character into action.

That character might feel so bitter about the positive attention received by your protagonist that they began to scheme to bring them down. This could result in anything from gossip, to spreading false rumours, to a false accusation or even to violence. The more likely it is that the narcissist would step into the shoes of the protagonist if they took them down, the more strongly the narcissist will be motivated.

Narcissists also have a marked tendency towards magical thinking. If the narcissist makes a mistake, or lets someone down, or has an embarrassing failure of some kind, they are likely to use all kinds of implausible and bizarre explanations to escape any feeling of shame. Often they will simply distort reality rather than admit to being at fault for anything, and distortions of reality can lead to all manner of problems.

They are also likely to project their failures onto others, as a way of dealing with the internal feeling of shame. They are extremely reluctant to admit to either failure or weakness, and experience admitting such things as very humiliating. An intelligent character will be able to use this tendency as a way of determining the narcissist’s secrets, because they tend to accuse other people of what they themselves are guilty of.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the narcissist is grandiosity, which manifests as a deep sense of superiority. This frequently becomes difficult for other characters in short order, because in the mind of the narcissist this sense of superiority gives them the right to treat others with contempt or disdain.

For this reason, narcissists tend to upset other characters. The more narcissistic those other characters are, the more they are likely to get upset – which is why it’s often dynamite when two narcissists meet. The coming together of two narcissist characters could make a fitting climax to any story or comedy.

Similar to the psychopath, the narcissist is capable of engendering powerful feelings of hate in other characters. These other characters are bound to feel that the narcissistic character is arrogant and rude, and the narcissistic tendency to be completely oblivious to the damage they cause only makes it more aggravating.

The narcissist is also capable of engendering powerful feelings of hate in themselves. Not being the centre of attention and adulation can be extremely damaging to the self-esteem of the narcissist. They might find meeting someone like a famous politician or distinguished intellectual to be an extremely unpleasant and belittling experience, enough to cause them depression for a while.

A narcissistic character will not necessarily bring misery into your story world, and this is another major way they are different to the psychopath. They may have found a way to sublimate their narcissism into bringing a lot of joy to people, such as becoming an actor or professional sportsman. Such a character might struggle with the excesses of their narcissism at the same time as mostly succeeding in bringing people joy.

Usually, however, narcissists do bring misery to those they encounter. The nature of the narcissist demands that they try and get the most adulation possible, and this means that they are prone to aggressively seeking high-status positions, even when there is another candidate who is obviously better qualified (a narcissist is not likely to realise that someone else is better qualified).

The narcissistic character might have an unpleasant early history that partially explains why they themselves are not a pleasant person. Many theorists believe that narcissism in adults is frequently caused by a lack of empathy and respect towards them when they were children, leading them to overcompensate as adults.

Frequently the narcissist will have one, or both, parents who did not seem to treat them as valuable when they were children. This lack of a normal, healthy level of positive attention in childhood is what makes the narcissist so desperate to receive it in adulthood. The narcissist might reveal, in their behaviour and actions, the resentment they feel towards perceived neglect.

This article is an excerpt from Writing With The DSM (Writing With Psychology Book 5), edited by Vince McLeod and due for release by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.

Fellas – It’s (Almost Entirely) A Question Of Demonstrating A Capacity For Resource Acquisition

If you have the health, the strength, the brains or the will to do this, then you can get laid

Countless reams have been written about the question of what women really want. This question has bedevilled great minds going all the way back to antiquity, and not even Sigmund Freud had a clue. Recent advances in evolutionary psychology have given us an answer from a biological perspective – but only for those who dare to read on!

In the animal world from which we have climbed, survival is primarily a matter of meeting metabolic needs. Every creature that lives has a need to eat, because only by eating are most animals capable of acquiring the necessary nutrients to keep breathing, to stay warm, and to have the energy to keep moving and find a breeding partner.

This is why the animal world has been described as “red in tooth and claw”, but there’s more to it than that. Whether a creature eats or dies, and therefore whether its genes are selected for in the next generation, is primarily a question of its capacity for resource acquisition.

Getting laid is all about demonstrating a capacity for resource acquisition. Why? Because this is by far the most accurate way for a female onlooker to determine if your genes are likely to produce offspring that are themselves capable of acquiring resources – in other words, if your genes are likely to produce offspring that can survive.

Whether an individual woman realises it or not, the females of every sexually reproducing species don’t care about anything else – and why would they? Compared to the need to gather resources to meet your metabolic needs, there’s little else that really matters for a sexually reproducing creature.

If one thinks about it, almost all of the qualities that women find attractive in men relate directly to his capacity for resource acquisition, and, by extension, the capacity for resource acquisition of any potential offspring.

There are four major ways that women determine a man’s capacity for resource acquisition, and all four of them correspond directly to major evolutionary challenges in the biological past of the human species (they also correspond to the four alchemical stages of clay, iron, silver and gold).

The first is to be healthy. After all, ill health in animals is often a consequence of not getting enough food, because without enough food it’s difficult to maintain an immune system that can keep the body free of diseases.

Having diseased skin or a rancid body odour will turn a woman off faster than anything, which is why men spend so much time washing and showering before they go into town. Both of those things suggest strongly that the man in question has failed to acquire the necessary resources for maintaining healthy bodily function. In other words, they appear to be dying, and nothing is less sexy than that!

The second major quality is to be tall and strong. Everyone knows that women are attracted to this, but fewer have thought it through to the next stage. Being tall and strong is extremely advantageous to the degree that resource acquisition has historically been dependent on the physical strength of the male in question.

This is apparent when one considers that males spent most of their time in the biological past hunting, which sometimes required hitting animals with sticks and bones or throwing rocks at them, and then carrying the prey back to the rest of the tribe on his shoulders, which are all matters of physical strength.

Arguably even more important is that fact that height and strength correlate very strongly with a male’s position on the social dominance hierarchy, which is the prime determinant of future mating opportunities. The stronger a man is the easier he will be able to defuse threats to himself, to his breeding partner or to their offspring.

The third major quality is to be intelligent. Not everyone appreciates the intense degree to which women are attracted to intelligence in breeding partners, which is probably because most people don’t really understand what intelligence is.

In the biological past, humans were able to acquire resources far more effectively if they were intelligent enough to notice and memorise certain patterns of nature. For instance, the first humans to figure out that large herbivores frequented watering holes were able to ambush those large herbivores, club them to death and thereby feed the entire tribe.

Ancient bushlore contains thousands of little patterns like this, unique to each locale in which they developed, but all with one thing in common – whoever possessed this bushlore was more effectively able to predict when and where the food was going to be.

The fact that intelligence has historically been an extremely important indicator of a man’s capacity to acquire resources can be seen from the manyfold increase in brain capacity in hominids over the past few million years, which is evidence of an extremely strong selective pressure in favour of it.

The fourth major quality is to be brave. This quality relates alchemically to the level of gold. Like the gold it is more subtle than the other qualities, and because of its rarity not quite as obvious.

Bravery relates to resource acquisition in ways like not letting another man take away the food that you have successfully hunted, or not letting the size of an animal scare you away from trying to club it to death. Essentially it’s the quality that allows a man to reduce the fear that makes him weaker and less intelligent.

In the modern world, resource acquisition has basically been reduced to having a job. If you have a job, chances are excellent that you have the capacity to acquire the necessary resources to feed a wife and children until those children are themselves capable of acquiring resources.

This is why being unemployed is extremely unattractive to women. Most women will naturally assume that a man without a job is either too lazy, too weak, too stupid or too cowardly to work or to hold down a job, and all of those four things correlate very poorly with the capacity to acquire resources.

Chris Rock joked about this in a stand-up comedy special, when he said “Fellas! If you lose your job you will lose your woman.” The reason why he had observed this pattern play out in his social circles is because a man losing his job has also lost his capacity for resource acquisition.

The other major quality that a man can possess to demonstrate his capacity for resource acquisition is to own a house. Females of all territorial species intuitively understand that the creature that dominates any given territory naturally controls all the resources within that territory, and so a man that controls a house appeals to very deep and powerful instincts.

Essentially, if a man is unable to get laid he needs to either become better looking, stronger, smarter or braver, because those are the qualities that correlate with a capacity for resource acquisition and are therefore the qualities that woman have evolved to select for in their breeding partners.

The Closer the Election Gets, the More Degraded Political Discourse Becomes

We’re fortunate that no campaigning is allowed on Election Day – if there was, it would just be the candidates throwing feces at each other

There’s a psychological heuristic about the effectiveness of logical arguments compared to emotional ones. In essence, rational arguments weigh more heavily in the long term, often producing permanent changes, but emotional arguments weigh more heavily in the short term, often producing immediate action. This simple rule explains why the quality of political discourse has degraded so sharply in recent weeks, and why it will degrade further in the next two.

This human tendency was demonstrated with a study that examined tooth brushing habits. Two groups listened to two different lectures from dental health professionals. The first lecture used calm, reasonable, logical arguments to explain why people should brush their teeth, the second used fire and brimstone and tried to scare the listeners into doing so.

Although people who heard the first lecture only made a small increase in how regularly they brushed their teeth, the change in behaviour lasted for a long time. This was in stark contrast to the emotional lecture. People who heard this one made a sharp increase in tooth-brushing behaviour immediately after the lecture but, over the long term, this then fell away to much lower levels than the people who had heard the logical arguments in the first lecture.

Our political class and their advisers, highly sophisticated in the art of psychological persuasion, know all of this and are using this knowledge against the plebs right now. The rule they are operating by is: the closer we get to the day of the election, the less effective logical arguments become, and the more effective emotional arguments become.

One year out from an election, there’s no real reason to get emotional. The voters themselves have not yet been whipped into hysteria by the mainstream media, and so any politician that noticeably becomes emotional will look unstable and lose support.

That far out, it’s much better to focus on calm, logical arguments that a potential voter can ruminate over at their leisure before making a solid commitment to a party on the basis of reason. This is because, as with the toothbrush study, this influence will be minor but permanent.

The day before an election, by contrast, is not the time for calm and logical arguments. It doesn’t make psychological sense to aim for a moderate but long-term gain when the election is the next day and the preferences of voters in one year’s time doesn’t count for shit. At this point, it only makes sense to appeal to the heart (and almost always to fear), in the hope that this wave of raw emotion will not have subsided by the next day.

Right now, two weeks out from Election Day, fewer logical arguments are being made. “Let’s Do This!” is not a logical argument, and that is why we have seen expressions of it much more often over the past week. Neither is whipping up fears about being taxed into the poorhouse.

Here the political discourse can already be seen to have degraded, but things will only get worse over the next two weeks as the miserable calculus of persuasion shifts the balance ever-further towards whipping up hysteria and fear.

In two weeks’ time, the discourse will have degraded so far that National supporters will simply be yelling “COMMUNISM!!!”, Labour supporters will be screaming “SOLD DOWN THE RIVER!!!”, New Zealand First supporters will be bellowing “NEOLIBERALISM!!!” and Greens supporters will be shrieking “POO IN THE WATER!!!”

And it will take us three years to get over the shame of how low we all stooped before we can do it again.