FEAR AND LOATHING IN BEATNICVILLE

Source of picture here:

Call this segment in my writer's blog: the things that a writer thinks about. I haven't written for days. The holiday and an adventure came between. Some minds want to know more about the world or about themselves while a sociopath wants to know which of our buttons they can push to get the results they desire.

Last week I returned to Spokane for a party at the company I retired from. I ran into an old nemesis of mine and confronted the smile of a sociopath. It interests me to no end to try and understand why this particular man's smile can chill me like that. I swear to you, the smile of this fellow says to me, "I know you. I know your fears and weaknesses, and if I can't control you that way, I'll kill you." I felt that same fear once around an ex-con in a bar back in my drinking days. I departed that bar swiftly. 
 
Am I truly looking into the grin of a sociopath, or does his smile trigger some horrific unconscious memory from my childhood? I have a terrifying childhood memory, a memory so deep that I did not recall for 50 years. I am being held face down in a couch pillow. My memory is of the moment when I am released and come up gasping for breath. Just a single strong memory. Who was holding my face into the pillow, I cannot recall, but it was a near death experience.
 
I wonder if the smile of the person who did that to my five year old self is the same as the smile of that fellow from work? I watched a PBS show on sociopaths, and, in that segment, a family man who had been diagnosed as a sociopath was featured in it. His own family said they feared him at times, but he credited his parents with showing him a path to achieve what he wanted without becoming criminal. I believe he ran his own business. 

Many sociopaths aren't murderers. They achieve what they want through other manipulations. I have a strong suspicion that a number of politicians and businesspeople at the economic top are sociopaths. A friend of mine recommended the book, "The Wisdom of the Sociopath" which I think I'll read someday. The way I look at it through the lense of evolution...the sociopath is almost the perfectly developed survival tool. That's pretty chilling, isn't it? To imagine that some fraction of global culture is headed up by sociopaths?