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 19 May 2008 @ 06:40, by deepwater. Counseling, Psychology
Guided Meditation Project:
I sat at my computer one day recently and a high powered flow of inspiration manifested as a series of questions , answers and more questions related to the following thought:
Create a simply worded yet profound guided meditation, or series thereof, that elucidates the state of being in relation to all that is, that conveys the method for understanding the subtle yet all pervasive essence of reality.
The expanded thoughts that evolved from contemplating these statements and questions are presented in full format at link
They will appear here as a series of articles soon, meanwhile, any insights or overviews from others will be most welcome.
The insights that flowed through are listed here: More >
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 15 May 2008 @ 03:03, by deepwater. Counseling, Psychology
All
that we percieve as having physicality, or substance is in fact a
construct of our interpretation of that which we percieve.
The
whole 'world' of our perceptions arises as phenomena within the mind.
Within
the percieved form however lies a complex, animated process of
information interaction.
The
energy from which this information flows and is structured is the all
pervading spirit.
The
point at which we can become aware of this inflowing energy is the
point where the concrete mind interfaces with the abstract mind.
The
energy of all that is animates and informs a point of consciousness
within via the soul. That point of consciousness then has the
potential to inform the mind. The mind has both empirical and
transcendent aspects as does our entire percievable universe. More >
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 18 Sep 2007 @ 17:55, by jerryvest. Counseling, Psychology
The mind provides us with a vital energy that is responsive to every moment. Developing awareness of this hidden resource is the gateway to real freedom and peace, a true refuge in a crowded and frustrating world. (Tarthang Tulku, Hidden Mind of Freedom)
I am going to introduce some more 'grist for the mill' on the relationship of the mental health industry and the drug corporations or Big Pharmas as they are called. I am also going to introduce the power of the Internet and forums to advance our goals. I will continue to identify the dangers that exist with these powerful corporations while they continue to influence and control their/our clients who wish to participate in our community mental health programs. The psychiatry industry, by virtue of their medical license, have the sanction to diagnose, label, and give every person/patient/client a number that represents a disorder in their DSM handbook.
Today, the NY Times introduced two articles related to the drug industry and their relationship with psychiatry. It is apparent to many of us that the public should be aware of psychiatry, this classification system and why we have such excessive costs of drugs and treatment. Also, the Insurance Corporations are also part of this coalition to control the private records, and to maintain the categorization patients for payment and for auditing purposes, as well.
Abstracted from NY Times article:
Billions of $'s given to doctors by drug companies to prescribe their drugs. How long will our politicians, professional organizations and communities allow this to happen?
Drug company representatives are a major presence. They sponsor Journal Club (where trainees learn to review new data and research), they pay for many of our weekly speakers and regularly offer free dinners for the residents and faculty. They enjoy free access to our mailboxes and regularly detail our trainees in their offices, hallways and in our little kitchen.
This is not uncommon. Meredith Rosenthal at the Harvard School of Public Health reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the industry spends roughly $15.7 billion annually marketing medications, with $4.8 billion dedicated to detailing individual physicians, or roughly $6,000 to $11,000 a doctor a year.
Studies indicate that most physicians meet with pharmaceutical representatives four times a month.
Studies also reveal that most physicians erroneously believe the representatives do not influence prescribing habits.
When doctors and trainees meet with reps, they change their prescribing habits and are far more likely to prescribe the drugs described, even when they are more expensive or have no benefit over alternatives. They are also more willing to request illogical changes to hospital guidelines that govern which drugs can be prescribed.
Estimates suggest that roughly $1 billion was spent advertising antidepressants to health professionals in 2000.
[link]
COMMENTARY; Drug Companies Get Too Close for Med School's Comfort
By DAN SHAPIRO
Published: January 20, 2004
In an 2002 article, Dr. Peterson wrote: ''Despite the lack of evidence of a significant difference in efficacy between older and newer agents, clinicians perceive the newer agents to be more efficacious -- these findings are significant as they highlight the discrepancy between empirical evidence and clinical practices and suggest that other factors influence clinicians' medication choices in the treatment of depression.''
The effect is easy to see in our department. The antidepressants fluoxetine, known popularly as Prozac, and paroxetine, known as Paxil, are now generic and cost patients and insurers pennies a day. Newer, rival drugs including sertraline (Zoloft), escitalopram (Lexapro) and Venlafaxine (Effexor) are 5 to 20 times as expensive.
In the last seven years, I have watched our residents prescribe the newest medications almost exclusively.
[link]
Do view this short video on "the tragic consequences of drugging our children.
[link]
Note: Picture by Mike Connealy More >
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27 Apr 2007 @ 19:17, by a-d. Counseling, Psychology
Hi all friends on NCN. I am posting this article on Autism, since so many people are affected by this MAN-induced disorder,forced upon Children, in the name of Pharma Profits -and Mind Control, mind you!.....
I found this Report/Article here:
[link]
Throwing children into oncoming traffic: The truth about Autism
By: Kenneth Stoller, MD, FAAP with Anne McElroy Dachel
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
I have been a practicing pediatrician for over 20 years. I saw my first child with autism in the early 90’s – before that I had never seen an autistic child, and I never saw an autistic child in all my years at school. The boy was 4 years old and you could see the frustration in his face as he wanted to speak but nothing intelligible would come from his mouth except shrieks of anguish.
As I studied his tortured face, it was as if there was an old time telephone switchboard operator inside his head trying to plug in the correct phone cables but not being able to complete the call. This family had known me from an old practice I worked at in another city, but they had traveled to see me because they trusted me and were looking for answers that no one seemed to have for them, but I too had no answers and I could see the mom was greatly disappointed. After the family left my office I poured over a few dusty textbooks and wondered if I had just seen a very rare disorder, a disorder that affected one child in 10,000 children…autism.
I had been involved in pediatrics for a decade by the time I saw this boy and it wasn’t as if I had no experience working with rare disorders. I had been able to identify a boy with Fragile-X syndrome and his mom ending up starting the Fragile-X support group at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
I had noticed there was a strange upswing in children with attention disorders and impulsivity problems. I wasn’t a neurologist, but had studied with one of the finest at UCLA. While I was still a pediatric resident I spent time in his office where he helped me study the parade of unusual maladies that was starting to afflict children. I considered myself a closet neurologist, because that was what I had really wanted to specialize in – not pediatrics, but during my neurology rotation in medical school I learned some discouraging news. The attending neurologist, whom I greatly admired, had taken me on rounds for the first time and I watched him brilliantly explain to the family of a stroke patient how he had figured out where in the brain the blood clot had lodged. Then he stood up and walked out of the room and I asked him what therapy he was going to prescribe for the patient so he could recover from his stroke, “therapy?” he said, “there is no therapy.” More >
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16 Feb 2006 @ 20:39, by poetsong. Counseling, Psychology
I ask a question, “Can hatred and love abide peaceably in the same house?” They can co-exist so long as love is willing to overlook hatred’s rantings, and hatred tolerates love’s different perspective, which it perceives as weakness. Co-existing is a far cry from fellowship. Fellowship is two becoming one, feeding and drinking in from another, being refreshed by them and refreshing them. If locked in a room, Hatred or Love will be forced to withhold their point of view, being frustrated with fragile truce at best. There will be friction or perhaps they will endure talking about sports and the weather until one of them wants to pick a fight.
Can prejudice and respect co-mingle? Will not one try to convert the other, or write the other off as rigid? If there is a peace it is not based on agreement.
I ask these questions because Unity for Unity’s sake is not going to bring peace. In fact it can bring frustration and confusion. In order for there to peace, certain things have to be universally accepted. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should ever give up on peace or being peace-makers. Rather, we have to understand the complexity of the problems of humanity.
A world without convictions is a world that believes in nothing. The human spirit longs for meaning, and so at our core we seek to believe in something, know why we believe it, and at least know that it is worth standing for. The world benefits by having some convictions. But this leads to frustration, because isn’t it these different convictions that bring about wars and frustration?
If you think I’m throwing my hands up in futility, I’m not. If I believe in love, and another believes in hate; I am not constrained to compromise. How then can there be peace? The key is identifying those core values that are beyond question.
Within the human spirit exists a compass. In some cases, this tool is more refined and a bit truer. On some level, this compass gives us a Universal sense of right and wrong. We all hate being lied to. Unless we squelch our conscience, which is possible, we generally feel horrible when we hurt another. If we fill a stadium anywhere in the world, and some powerfully built man starts kicking a puppy, the entire stadium would cry out in anger for him to stop. We love to see people fall in love, and hate to see love die.
I am saying this for a reason. I need to understand that there is a compass, and what the primary law of that compass is in order to have any hope of appealing to mankind. There is no secret. The primary law of the compass is love. I can’t convince another of that, but have to be convinced of that in order for me to have a starting place to change the world. If I don’t, then I am pissing in the wind as far as others are concerned. If I have no conviction, I have absolutely no chance of changing another person’s heart.
Now, with love as my guide, my view of my enemy changes. They may be prejudiced, they may hate, they may be rigid; but I know that love displayed is powerful. If I choose to hate them, I have agreed that it is okay to hate. This may make no sense, but loving my enemy is the only way to change any enemy. This doesn’t mean I can’t establish a boundary. It doesn’t mean I have to like what they do. However, I have to have the ability to see past their prejudice, their hatred, and see someone of value. I can’t lose sight of that for a moment, even if I am against what they believe.
So, if I am forced to live in a house of hatred, I can hate their hatred, but not them, or I am becoming like them. In a sense, those who believe in love become an ambassador of love; and ambassador’s are not always assigned to friendly countries.
Hatred and love can dwell in a house, as long as love abides and holds true to their convictions. Hatred is an inferior position. Inwardly, so many mechanisms have to take place, hardening ourselves to another’s pain…etc, that it is futility to defend. However, only love can overcome hatred. And by this, I mean stubborn love. The superior position is difficult, requires sacrifice, and therefore must be a conviction; but throughout history, we have examples of those who have overcome the hardened gates of hate with love’s key; because those who hate have something within them, a voice that may be locked in a dark room guarded by fear and anger. Often times that compass is still in there, and a stubborn love can bring it out. More >
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15 Jul 2005 @ 19:52, by bkodish. Counseling, Psychology
One should not forget the phenomenon of Jewish Self-Hatred, in understanding Thomas Friedman (nominally Jewish), the editorial policies of the New York Times (owned by nominal Jews), and the behavior of many nominally Jewish liberals and leftists who disparage or condemn Israel.
In its most extreme manifestations such individuals actively work to undermine Israel or like Noam Chomsky may even qualify as out and out antisemites. (Many non-Jews, as well as Jews seem completely clueless about Jewish Self-Hatred.)
Jewish self-hatred also needs to be taken into account to understand the behaviors of much of the 'leadership' of successive Israeli governments and of a large portion of Israeli academic and media leftists.
Many years ago psychologist Kurt Lewin described Jewish self-hatred thusly: More >
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25 Jan 2005 @ 11:04, by swanny. Counseling, Psychology
Ah synchronicity at work I see
I was just having an inquiry into the same topic as
Hoodgame in its only words
I was just wonderin about the phenomenum itself
How and why perhaps it occurs and around what?
Anyway heres what I writ.
FIRST MEMORIES
An Inquiry into the dawning of ones primal or "first" consciousness or awareness.
When......... when does first awareness occur and how is it that it becomes
a memory and why and how does it become a memory.
I suppose in my own regard my first memory seems to be at the age of
3 years and 8 months. A vague realization of the birth of a younger brother.
I suppose "birth" is a "significant" enough event in the human experience to
denote it for recall or such yet how, why and when does and "can" first memory
occur. What is required to make as it were the connection to self, other and world.
Is some sort of cognitive global mechanism or data schemata or rudimentary
apparatus require a certain set of parameters to be met before first memories can
occur and if so can that shape us for the rest of life.
Are our lives somewhat dependent and shaped by our first memory experience?
That memory stands out but I have seen evidence of that time. What is the effect of that? What is the effect of "seeing" pictures of times we don't really recall yet
"knowing" somehow that they did occur because of the evidence and "hard" evidence of there existence. Does this evidence though "taint" or interrupt the memory process.
I suppose another memory is around the time of the age of six years and a mentioning of first grade and the "Beatles" somehow. Interesting the impact
of a mere "musical" group to pervade the awareness so all consumingly of not only
myself but of the planet it would seem.
Do you have any awareness or input into these matters and does it have a real or
physical connection somehow to the now? More >
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 19 Oct 2004 @ 12:16, by scotty. Counseling, Psychology
and our odd relationship with Truth.
( ~ the Co-Intellegence Inst )
"There is a lot of attention right now on the US government lying to We the People, probably with intention to mislead. In some circles there is also dismay (and cynicism) at the ability (and sometimes apparent eagerness) of We the People to be misled.
There are many political dimensions to this, being reported by many qualified commentators. But here I want to dig a bit into our odd relationship with truth. It is a complex relationship and, I think, an important one to pay attention to." More >
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7 Oct 2004 @ 11:06, by jwwells. Counseling, Psychology
This is an extract of the notes for my partially finished book on the search for spiritual healing among men. It is offered as the result of a conversation over on the Visual Arts board.
-------------------------------
We've done a fantastic job of fixing women's problems. While not all such problems have been repaired, the system is in place to ensure that the remainder will be fixed. That said, we have taken no steps towards fixing men's problems and have made many things much worse for men by the actions we've taken to fix women's problems. This is no one's fault. We didn't know what we were doing: We guessed and often guessed wrong.
One of the primary reasons for guessing wrong is we did not know of two gender-weaknesses which can control human interactions:
a) For males, the more power a man has the greater the odds he will ignore male issues. This is why a male Minister of Health will usually vote against more funding for Prostate Cancer, even if he himself has Prostate Cancer.
b) For females, the more damaged the woman, the greater the odds she will see herself as at the bottom of society, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This gives rise to women demanding that Prostate Cancer "obviously" receives more funding than Breast Cancer in the face of accountants saying that Breast Cancer receives 3 to 7 times more funding.
The result is we have growing groups of men who are quite unhealthy, they are damaged in real and predictable ways. To fix these problems we must see the groups as they are: We must look through no filter and see what is. We must learn not see what we want to see.
Damaged Men I have known
First, let me explain exactly what I mean by a damaged man. The damaged man shows up when a man is hurt and then denied help and told he is at fault for being hurt in the first place. He enters what a computer programmer would call a feedback loop. One good (and sadly all too real and common) example is as follows:
Bert's wife Shelly, a difficult woman who yelled and threw things, ran off with a man from down the street. Bert was left with three daughters, ages 5, 7 & 10. A few months after leaving Shelly decided she wanted the girls. She charged Bert with molesting them, which she thought would be a good tool to separate the girls and Bert. After two years of fighting, Bert with the aid of six neighbours and several relatives proved that not only had no molestation taken place, but there had been physical child abuse from Shelly. The girls were in a bad state by the time Bert got them back from Children's Aid. That is the first step, the violence.
Bert was told that since no crime had happened there could be no government provided therapy for himself or the girls, (such help is woman only): That creates the second step towards a damaged man, the refusal.
Shelly's next move was to sue for spousal support and for child support when the girls where visiting her: Shelly had never paid any child support; (paying is rare in non-custodial mothers). By the time this issue was thrown out of court Bert was bankrupt. He and the girls had lost their home and Bert had lost the store his grand-father had started. That's more of the violence part of creating a damaged man.
The final damage comes from Bert being told in the media and in signs and in posters and on TV and on Radio and on the internet, almost every day, that women are not violent and never lie about violence: Men, the ads go, always lie and are often violent. It takes that third part to create the damage we see in what I call a damaged man.
A damaged man is created in three parts:
a) the violence
b) the refusal of help
c) the violent lies about all males
These three archetypes of the damaged man show up repeatedly. Obviously, no one archetype is shown completely in any one man. Yet, one archetype rules so clearly that they are worth discussing. These three forms of men are all men harmed by some form of violence, refused help and then re-harmed by society's effort to aid women.
The Junk Yard Dog: So badly damaged is this man that in his mind no difference exists between friend, foe and bystander: All are enemies. He is in hell on earth lashing out forever in all directions. In many ways these men are insane: They have lost all connection with a world which includes joy, peace and happiness. The Junk Yard Dog infests the men's movement: The prevalence of Junk Yard Dogs forever holds the men's movement in a state of not-together. The Junk Yard Dog is by far the fastest growing form of damaged man: Our efforts to aid women and children create ever more Junk Yard Dogs, soon they will be the most common form of damaged man and maybe the most common form of man period. Bert from above, is a Junk Yard Dog. Our help system seeks to cure these men through anger-management programs, which is the worst thing which can be done to them, for it feeds their definition of the world as enemy. The Junk Yard Dog must be reached where he is; by hearing the pain, completely, totally and without the bigotry we have all been force fed. Then, and only then, can he be led through the spirt to the beginnings of healing. In many ways these are the easiest to reach of the damaged men.
The Denier: This man denies all externally caused personal pain and problems: To him they do not exist and therefore cannot hurt him. This is the man whose wife tried to kill him who calls into a talk-radio shows on Family Violence and loudly demands that battered men do not need service: To him if there were services for battered men, then he would have a problem that the service could handle, but he in his own mind cannot have a problem, so he must stop, at all costs, any effort to create service for men. Likewise, he will interrupt a conversation on male bashing with "Men are pigs! Sexism against men is impossible." He must, always and in all ways, deny that pain could exist, for if he stops, he might feel his pain. The Denier is found scattered throughout all conservative, leftist and feminist areas of society: At about one in fourteen men this is still the most common form of damaged man. The Denier, is the most dangerous form of damaged man, for he feeds the urge to see all males as biological cash machines. No part of our help system touches these men, for they will allow no help. However, a woman who has worked through her own pain can reach him as can sidestepping the pain to come at him through the spiritual approach. These men are deadly poison to men searching for healing.
The Patient: This man is a version of the "Poor Me" woman. He can only see his life as pain. For him, there is no life but pain. Therefore, for him, any effort to stop the pain, is a threat to his life. The Patient is quite hard to find, but he is there for anyone to find who makes the effort to look; they are a case of hiding in plain sight. I was once a Patient. The Patient is found quietly supporting the Denier: He too, in his mind, loses if they treat his pain, for he forever feeds on his pain. A careful and considerate listener can help these men to see their own pain for what it is and through that, a path to healing. The worst thing a person can do with a Patient is give him examples of other men who have been similarly harmed: He will see that as mocking him.
Psychologists and therapists, too many of which are themselves Deniers, cannot, will not or do not reach these men: All too often it is "will not" for reasons which are too complex for this short article. However, the path to reaching this damaged man went through spirituality and so, that is where I start my hunt for a way to touch his fractured soul, from which I hope to reach his mind.
----------------------------------------- More >
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 29 Sep 2004 @ 19:28, by ming. Counseling, Psychology
That isn't really a very hard question, but it gets hard if one sort of starts in the wrong place.
If you start off by assuming the universe and the life in it is just some random and meaningless occurrance, then it is a fairly meaningless question too. It just becomes something to say about people you really don't like. Or if your starting point is a story about God and the Devil, then it becomes a really convoluted thing to try to explain.
I start with the observation and assumption that everybody and everything fundamentally is good. Not particularly "good" in a good versus evil sense. Not a polarized idea. Rather, everything is inherently tending towards being and doing something that has a constructive angle to it. It is good for something in the bigger or smaller picture. Or at least it is neutral.
A rock is a certain piece of something that has certain properties. It doesn't do a whole lot, but it can be a piece of a mountain, or a wall, or many other useful things. If a rock once in a while falls on somebody's head and hurts them, it isn't because the rock is evil and was trying to do some damage. It is rather passively just being a rock, and obeying the law of gravity and things like that. Obviously.
A tree is an alive entity that does a whole lot more, and actively extracts stuff from the environment, grows certain structures, and reproduces, etc. It has a certain natural cycle of how it does things. If one day a dead branch falls off a tree and kills somebody, it isn't because the tree is evil and meant to do that to be mean. Dead branches fall off eventually, and it was just time, and the wind helped a bit and then a bird sat on it. None of which was meant to harm anybody.
How about animals, then. They spend a good deal of their time going around killing other living entities. At least they eat plants, killing them in the process. Or they hunt down other animals, kill them and eat them? Is that evil? Well, we might not like it when we look at it, but the animals appear to have no ill will about it. That is just what they do, and they need to eat. Even the animals eaten don't seem to be as stressed about it as we humans might be when contemplating it. A fish eats another fish. They second fish would instinctively get away if it could, but if it gets eaten there doesn't seem to be much involved that we'll recognize as emotion or suffering. Nothing evil anywhere. Even if they sometimes do it for sport. Our cat will happily keep a wounded lizard alive for as long as possible, while lazily dashing it around. Or bring a half-dead bird into the house and drag it around. Is it evil? Well, we sure don't like it, but no amount of yelling about it seems to make any difference. It will happily do it again. Because it serves a function. A cat in the wild would of course need to practice its hunting skills in order to get food and survive. Nothing personal about it. It is not that it doesn't like birds or anything.
So, now, us humans are a little more complicated. We think abstractly and have feelings about complicated things. But most of the time we also just go about our business. We learn how to do things, find a spot to do it in, we eat, reproduce, entertain ourselves, form social groups, build tools, etc.
Everybody's inherently just trying to live and do what seems to be there to do. When provided with a choice, we'll generally choose the better one according to our aggregated instincts for what we're trying to do and what works. Life is trying to survive well and do better. It would be fair to assume that such a fundamntal aim is built into all life-forms. Certainly we can observe it in anything that lives.
But we humans are more vulnerable to bad information. In part because we do many things abstractly, apparently as opposed to many other players in nature. And, related to that, that our activities get very complicated. It is no longer just to eat the first thing that comes along that looks edible whenever we're hungry. The choices concerning maintaining and improving our lives are increasingly made with abstract information, and with the real stuff being quite removed from us. And we're tied into abstract social systems that might be beyond us individually to understand.
So, if I'm a soldier trained to kill people, and I do so, is that evil? Not necessarily. I might have the information that I'm doing so in order to protect the large social group that I consider myself belonging to. I might have been brought up and educated and trained to look at it a certain way, and I simply do what I consider my duty, and what seems logical. Not necessarily anything personal against the people I kill. I'm acting according to the information I have, the training I've been given, and the circumstances I'm in.
If I were a German soldier controlled by the Nazis, does that suddenly make it different? Not really. I'm still a victim of the information I have and what I've been trained into, and I might have limited choices available to make it all different.
What if I'm a burglar or bank robber, stealing with a gun in my hand, to fund my crack habit. Evil? Maybe just the only solution I saw available to me. Again, doesn't make it right or permissible in society, but for the individual it might still be a matter of doing the best I can with my limited options, and possibly false information and misguided beliefs.
Am I saying that there's no evil, and everybody's just acting within the information they have? Not quite. That's what's going on most of the time. But there's still something we could call "evil". Which is relatively rare.
You know, when one looks at what is going on in the world, and one doesn't get around to seeing it in such an "understanding" fashion as I attempt here, one might well reach some different conclusions. There are bad people in the world, and they seem to get away with it. Being bad works. It is much easier and more productive to think about just yourself, and not care about anybody else.
It is a misunderstanding, really. Again, based on faulty information, an individual looks around him and concludes that other people are evil and therefore they have the upper hand. And insted of continuing to be the victim of them, he flips around and instead assumes what he believes is their kind of personality. Bad. Evil. Thinking just about yourself, and not caring who gets hurt when they get in your way.
It is not about certain types of actions that are inherently evil. Those depend on the context. What is key here is the intention. Somebody who actually intends to do harm and it doesn't bother them.
It is a fake personality. Nobody really were like that originally. There are no evil babies. But a sufficient amount of torture and abuse from an early age from one's parents or from authorities or from what one perceives as "the system" can do it to the best of people. Or one might simply take a "logical" overview of the world and mistakenly conclude that being evil is the way to go.
One might do all that unconsciously, without thinking it through, simply changing one's personality to survive. Or, more chillingly, one might consciously conclude that it will work and one will get ahead over others by being that way.
Very few people have adopted what we could call an "evil" personality. Maybe a couple of percent of us. But that can create a lot of havoc. And any of us might in some moments, for reasons we might not completely understand ourselves, instinctively choose to be evil, and to act with the sole intention to hurt others, maybe to bring oneself ahead.
Either way, it is a copy of what we think others are doing. Which they probably weren't really doing for the reasons we think. The parent who was mean to you when you were little might have had their own story of being a victim of the circumstances and of bad information. They might think the Bible told them to beat you, to make you a better person. Or they were repeating what their parents did to them. Or they were lost and stuck and unaware.
But one way or another, some people end up acting as if they're evil, and they will deliberately hurt other people and enjoy it. Psychopaths. That only happens when they're already pretty bad off, when they've closed their hearts, when they never developed any empathy for others, and when they're loaded with false information about how life works. But there's plenty of that around, and no general education that teaches you how to be social.
So, what to do about that? Well, with the majority of people, who're mostly trying to do what they think is good, reason and kindness and good information will work. If they do something that hurts others, one can make them understand that, and they would naturally feel bad about it and try to do it better. But with the smaller number of people who're stuck in the evil personality, it is quite different. Being nice to them is not going to help, and will only show them how weak you are; and showing them how their actions hurt others is only going to encourage them. Because they aren't really there, but they have adopted a strategy quite opposite to yours or mine, and they've invested a lot in cementing it into place.
Anybody might change. One might wake up and realize what one is doing, and change one's ways. But with this kind of thing, it doesn't happen easily or casually. It does happen, though.
But in the meantime it would be valuable to develop a keen ability to notice who's who. If the person in front of you is still connected with their basic goodness, then you can talk with them, give them information, tell them truth, share how you feel, and you might get along better, and they'll use what they learn to make better decisions afterwards, more beneficial decisions. If the person in front of you is one of the very few who have lost touch with who they really are, and adopted an evil personality, then it is all different. They'd use everything they learn about you to gain an upper hand over you and get you out of the way.
Now, many people have bad inter-personal skills and foggy perceptions and lots of emotional baggage and might easily conclude that what I described fits perfectly on their ex-wife or their boss. So let me say again that the odds are that it isn't so. Most likely any differences could be sorted out if the emotional baggage gets out of the way, and it becomes evident that all parties really would like things to work.
It is a bit dangerous to even have labels like that, as people who can't figure out how to understand each other and get along are likely to hide behind horrible labels they apply to each other. You know, if you have a different belief system than I, and you do things I don't like, you're just evil. No, it is not that I'm talking about.
No, we're more talking about serial killers and otherwise criminally insane psychopaths. Oh, and some of the people who are gang members, muggers, terrorists, etc. But far from all. And indeed there would be people in the group that wouldn't be very obvious at all. Well-educated CEOs of companies, government officials, people who on the surface appear to have great people skills, be charming and eloquent, have families, etc. But underneath, their modus operendi is to sabotage and disable everybody else, preferably in the hidden, so that they can get their own way and the others don't. Everything looks right on the outside, to the casual observer, but inside we have the walking dead, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake, which they well might succeed to make appear as somebody else's fault. Hard to pinpoint, but very important, to spot the psychopaths that don't look the part. And not to pick them as your leaders.
As some point we might with some luck have a society that makes it easier for us to connect with our basic humanity, and which no longer rewards psychopathic behavior. Until then it is just very necessary to pay close attention to what people's basic motivations really are.
Another angle on it is that despite our individually fairly noble intentions, we might very well accidentally create organizations that possess similar characteristics as that of a psychotic individual. It is not very hard for a large corporation to be evil, and to act in its own interest to the detriment of anybody who gets in the way. For that matter, it is inherent in its design. Only if some of the people running it go way out of their way to make it act more decently and socially can it be otherwise. More >
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