Inside the Mind of Evil: A Psychological Exploration
Twisted Thoughts: Cognitive Patterns of the Malevolent
If you study the fantasies of very, very dark people you see that they brewed and fantasized in isolation for years and the fantasies got darker and darker and darker. So they're bitter and resentful, to begin with, and then they start fantasizing about, well, what they would want. That can take a sexual and or it can take a very violent one.And take both and what they're after is the ultimate in revenge. And on the sexual front, they find a kick in extending the, what would you call it, the unacceptability of the fantasy 1 stage at a time.The famous and handsome sexual serial killer. What was his name He's a famous photograph of him like this very attractive man. Do you remember his dead Bundy buddy Ted Bundy Ted Bundy detailed exactly how he. Fantasies progressed as he became more and more involved with ***********. And what happens in some sense is that these people who are nursing these terrible fantasies want to stay on the edge of novelty. And so, their fantasies get darker and darker and darker as they progress down that road. And so, after 1000, such micro progressions they end up. Exactly the sort of pit that you're describing. And some of that is pure sexual kick because of the novelty. And but it's got this sadistic and perverse vengeful twist. And you could think about it this way. You know, I think it says in the Gospels that, you know, it would be better.That that the most millstone was hung around your neck and that you were cast into the abyss than to harm any of God's children, let's say. And that's actually where the perverse delight comes, because the most egregious possible sin, let's say, is the violent sexual abuse of the most innocent possible person.And the perverse novelty kick is highest at exactly that point. And then that just goes from bad to worse. And there's 1000 or even 10,000 micro-decisions that go along with that. There's also a great book called Ordinary Men. This is well worth reading, although it's a bloody catastrophe to read. I'll tell you it details out how a group of.German policemen who were moved to Poland during World War Two were transformed from ordinary middle-class working class or sorry, ordinary working-class men.Old enough to not have been raised under the Nazi regime, by the way, and so not propagandized into a kind of mindless obedience. How they went from being perfectly ordinary policemen to the sort of people who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head. And it.Like they had an easy time with that. Some of them reported the same sort of thing that you reported when you first watched that video. What they were being called upon to do stage by stage made them physically ill and they had a commander who told them that they could leave the service if they didn't want to continue with their duties. But they felt.Bound not to leave their comrades having to mop up the terrible situation. But it does a lovely job of detailing out how your movement from normality to absolute perversity is a consequence of 10,000.Micro, what would you say? Micro violations of your conscience? Not all of the micro. So, you know, you need to know about the vengefulness, you need to know about the kick of sadism. That's that novelty kick that produces a dopaminergic kick that heightens sexual satisfaction. And so, there's an element of. Sadistic misery that can add novelty to sex. That's particularly attractive to people who are bitter and resentful because they actually can't find any willing sexual partners and so they're angry at the world and shake their fists at God because of it. And so anyways, that's a bit of the developmental course of such a lovely.Descent into hell. And the interesting thing about it is that people brew days like you don't get to the point where you're watching pornographic videos of children being raped without hundreds or even thousands of hours of increasingly demented voluntary fantasy. And that's that.Allowing the spirit of sin that would otherwise Crouch on your doorstep to enter your house and have its way with you, right? It's like a collaborative venture with Satan himself. That's the most straightforward way of describing it. And so well, so that's I don't know what you have to say about that, but I'll let you have an adder. I'll.Say that everything you're saying resonates with my anecdotal experiences dealing with these people. I look into their eyes and what you're describing is what I see, though I've never been able to articulate it like you just have. So I appreciate being armed with with.With an understanding that it will help me evangelize more clearly to others about the dangers of over-stimulation and overview of *********** and shaking hands with the devil. So thank you for that. That was very insightful.So, I spent a bit of time, not a lot, but a bit of time inside a maximum security prison when I was a kid. I worked with a very strange psychologist who was there. And one of the things that shocked me and I, I think this shocked me enough to change my whole life was. I, I met this, I met this one prisoner who was a pretty nondescript-looking character. He took me for a walkout in the yard away from a gym full of weight-lifting ax-murderer monsters and rapists. And we went for a walk out in the yard and the psychologist called us back and told me later in the office that this guy.It's about 5:00 to the pretty unprepossessing guy who made two policemen. Kneel in front of him, begged for their lives about their families, and then shot them both in the back of the head and kicked them aside. And the shocking thing to me was, you know, you kind of think that. If you met pure evil, it would, it would have a monstrous form. And you know, the thing that shocked me about that was the nondescript nature of this guy. You know, his, his banal ordinariness, the fact that you could just walk past him on the street, you'd never know he wasn't some monster. You know, the monstrous character of.Satan in your imagination is, you know, a figure that's terrifying to behold instead of someone normal. You know what I mean? Normal in that cringing sense. These people that you've interacted with, like what's your reaction to them when you talk to them, the pedophiles when you talk to them, and when you arrest them?My experience is very similar to what you just described. Very nondescript people from all walks of life. We've, we've arrested and I've interrogated educators, lawyers, law enforcement, clergymen.And, sitting across from them, there's but with no apparent physicality that would tell you who they are. But I will say this, when they start talking and I look into their eyes, that's when I can, I sense something that that it, that scares the hell out of me.And the way they talk about children and when they get there and it's, it's something that they've been able to normalize and they're speaking to me about children almost like they're talking about, you know, like the weather or, you know, talking about buying and selling children like you talk about buying and.Computer parts or an automobile or something. And that's where I thought something has taken over you something non-human has made you less human and I've never been able to figure it out, only that it creeps me out.And I usually end up getting them to confess because they have brought themselves to a place where they think they're OK. They think that it's somehow normal. I don't know if that makes sense. How are they, Doctor Peterson? Well, the degree of rationalization that has to do with each step forward in the progress of the.Fantasy there has to be a step forward in the self-deception with regards to self-description, right? So imagine that you're attempting to cling to a sense of yourself at least as normal, but even maybe as a moral agent. I mean the more forthright pedophiles claim that.They're only allowing children to express their true sexual desires and what they're doing is forming the best relationship with the children that they've ever had. Now, of course, there's part of them that knows that that's a bloody, screaming hellish lie. But you get to that lie, like I said, with 1000 micro lies, right? And you're modifying yourself.Conception along the way means have you had these people justify themselves to you, and if so, by what means do they attempt to do that? So one person that comes to mind gets an absolute answer is yes, and one person that comes to mind is the person depicted in the film Oshinsky.This person had written articles, self-published, of course, he had a book that he sold on Amazon, and his understanding or his justification was that the puritanical Society of this country had crushed the truth.And and beautiful and righteous sexual experience which the the most natural would be between a man and a child, a prepubescent child is the most beautiful form of humanity.And why? Why take that away from a child? Children would be well conditioned to confront the challenges of life if only they could experience orgasmic pleasure even in their prepubescent. This is how they talk.Right, right. Yeah. Well, you saw echoes of that. There were attempts made in the 1970s by French intellectuals, surprise, surprise, to have the age of consent reduced radically. And that was always the rationale. It was an extension of the patriarchal oppression theory in some sense, right, That all sexual expression is essential.And good in its most fundamental form. And it's all warped by social pressure. And if we were just allowed to express ourselves in every manner that we saw fit, that everyone would be free and we wouldn't suffer anymore from the constraints of tyrannical society, right? And it's just convenient for the bloody pedophiles that that happens to justify them doing whatever.What the hell do they want children who are too young to consent?
About the Creator
Alice Wonder
I’m Alice Wonder, a psychology enthusiast passionate about exploring the human mind. I love breaking down complex ideas and sharing insights that make psychology relatable and engaging. Join me on this journey of discovery!
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The Four Faces of Darkness: A Psychological Exploration
Explaining to people let let's walk through your your research on the dark triad. How did you become interested in this how did you develop the measurement instruments and what do you measure?Well, like a lot of academics, my research can be traced back to my advisor, who is Richard Christie, the inventor of Machiavellianism as a trait. And he did something very clever. He went into the books of.Nicole Machiavelli, who was an advisor to politicians way back when he took the statements, administered them to undergraduate students and simply asked them, how much do you agree with these statements?You have to get to know important people and always be prepared for the worst in people. And the amazing thing was the huge variance in the responses. And that's what personality research is all about, we look for.And wallow in relish the fact that people give different answers. And apparently, a lot of people agreed with the statements that Machiavelli made in the 1500s. Others were horrified by them. And so that inspired.Richard Christie to make a questionnaire. The Mac 4, the most popular version of his questionnaires, was administered to subject pools at his university.Columbia University and elsewhere. And it wasn't just self-reports that predicted actual behavior. So he could show that people scored high on the Mac 4 and manipulated others.In a room, in a laboratory. So they would try to squeeze money out of other people by tricking them, and all of this could be recorded and published.Hence, Richard Christie is forever associated with Machiavellianism, so I.I was.I thought that was a fabulous way to do research. I moved on then and took a real job at the University of British Columbia and met up there with Bob Hare, sort of the emperor of research on psychopathy.Another averse of a trait.And of course, he has done it all. But what he didn't do was compare it to Machiavellianism. And I've also done some research separately.On narcissism, which captured the attention of researchers in the 1980s because it seems to resonate. Everybody knows narcissists, people who want a lot of attention and think they are superior to everyone else.Everyone can resonate with knowing such people.So we have 3 personality variables then.And when the student, Kevin Williams came along.And typically in my career, I go with what the students want to do. We decided to figure out whether there were more. Are they more averse to personalities?So we searched the literature and we did as much as we could back then, early 2000s, to cover all the literature and see if there was more.Personalities that.That we're at the level of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. We call them the Dark Triad because they seem to dominate the literature. They're already hundreds of studies.On each one of those.The unfortunate result, fortunate in the long run I suppose, is that the literature overlapped so much you could barely tell the difference if you took all the literature on narcissism and all the literature on Machiavellianism.And psychopathy, you could see the same things coming up.And that was the original problem. We want to parse the dark side of traits, but you can't do much with the literature because of this phenomenon that we call.Construct creep. That is, a researcher can't research everything at once, so they focus on one variable, but it creeps wider and wider until it overlaps with other variables.And that's a problem because you don't know which one you're studying when you put it into a research program, which one is responsible for the action you're seeing, Right, Right. Well, we want to talk about that in some more detail too, because I'd like to find out a bit more about it.How do you feel? I know that the dark tried has morphed into the dark tetrad to some degree, and I'm also curious as to what you have to say about the overlap between the dark tetrad qualities and personality disorder categories, especially in the.Histrionic, antisocial and narcissistic categories. That shades into personality pathology and so can I. Can I define the three traits and have you correct my definitions if you would do the Machiavellians?As you pointed out, Machiavelli was an advisor to the Princess who was interested in some sense in the outright maintenance of instrumental power. I wouldn't say he was driven by any intrinsic ethic. It was.Machiavelli gave pieces of advice to printers who wanted to maintain their position by hook or by crook, let's say. So Machiavellians are willing to use manipulation to obtain their ends, and narcissists seem to be driven by a high desire to.To obtain unearned status from others. And the most important thing for them is not status in relationship to competence, let's say, or in relationship to performance, but just in status for its own sake. And then the psychopaths I spent a lot of time looking at Harris's research and thinking about.Relationship to the Big 5 psychopaths seem to be something approximating parasitical, parasitical predators. And so they're very, very low in agreeableness and that makes them callous and non-empathetic, and then they also seem to be very low in conscientiousness that seems to.Accord reasonably well with the two factors of the Psychopathy scale. And so a real psychopath is someone willing to take what you have, let's say, and use it. And that might be the predatory aspect and also to live off the earnings and efforts of others. And that's also an element of criminal behavior and so on.You're looking at the Nexus of all three of those, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. And recently you and other researchers have added, I think this is so interesting 'cause I think it was a real lack. You, you, you added sadism to that which is positive delight and pleasure taken in the suffering of others.So can you expand it all upon the definitions of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy and we could segue into sadism?Yeah, I agree with all of your definitions, although what we did was spend a lot of time trying to find what's different.Among each of the characters and what the overlap is. Why is it that the literature and the available measures always overlapped?To a dangerous degree in trying to understand what's going on. So the key thing for psychopaths, in our opinion, is impulsivity.Our sensation-seeking is what gets them into trouble. They may not have worse motives than the others, but they can't help it. That's why they are at the extreme levels.Spend their lives in prison.They can't help.Of responding to temptation. Whatever the temptation is, they go for it. And often they get what they want right away, and they keep on doing it until they get caught.And they don't seem to learn from it. So that answers just a qualification to the definition of psychopath. Now, what's underlying it, we think, is callousness for all of them.They're overlapping because at the core, a failure to have empathy. And if you have a deficit and empathy, it seems inevitable that you're going to exploit other people in one way or another because you're not, you're not getting it.The feedback that people with empathy get from seeing other people suffer at your hands.And the story of sadism is, is quite a long story, but if you want me to get into the details, yeah, please do. Please do. Yeah. I don't know whether I'm more sensitive to these things than other people, but.Then I started seeing sadism in regular people and not only is it there and everyday people, but people seem to wallow in it when the circumstances allow it, for example.Violent sports.One of my favorite sports is hockey.It's kind of pathetic watching a hockey game. The cheers are larger, larger for the fights and the goals. People love to see their fighter pummel the fighter of the other team.Pummel anyone? And the cheers that go up in a hockey stadium are incredible. And the cheers only stop when the victim falls to the ice and starts twitching.A hush follows over the crowd, showing the dual nature of positive and negative motivations that human beings have, but the fact that they love seeing the fight no matter how much blood and teeth.End up on the ice is disappointing in the way and we learned a long time ago from the Europeans they don't have to do that to make hockey. Hockey a a wonderful sport.That was just one. But then watching the undergraduate students at UBC, University of British Columbia, what are they doing for fun? Well, if you'll recall, way, way back, they used to play these archive games.And there were some gentle ones, Pac-Man asteroids. I don't know if you remember those, but.Going down into the arcade, you see that people are gathered around one of the arcade games and so I wandered over to see it and it was something called Mortal Kombat.By today's S standards isn't that bad, but the heads are torn off and the blood spurts out. And that's why that crowd was there, because with so much more appealing.Then the silly little Mario Brothers stuff.And it just struck me as.The beginning of my interest in what people do, especially young males, when they have time on their own.So it's not **** then? It seems like it's violent.It's somewhat horrifying, but it's gotten worse. I don't know if you've been following the video games.Those are now available on your home computer you don't need to go to an arcade and be embarrassed by what you're playing because you can sit at home and play whatever games you want and so now.What's it called? A Grand Theft Auto. You can kill innocent bystanders, step on their heads, et cetera. And there are actual torture sites where you can go and torture people. You can torture animals.It's all there, and so people are paying to do this stuff. They pay for violent sports, they pay for violent movies. What's the most popular television program these days?It's called Game of Thrones, and it's the most sadistic kind of television program that you've ever seen.People are paying for this in one way or another and they're attracted to it. They relay stories with their friends. So putting this picture together suggested to me that some. Not all.The variance again, is there, which excites a personality researcher. Some people are highly attracted to this stuff, other people are horrified.Jordan Peterson, you've said that men need to quote, grow the hell up. Tell me why.Well, because there's nothing uglier than an old infant. There's nothing good about it. People who don't grow up don't find the sort of meaning in their life that sustains them through difficult times, and they are certain to encounter difficult times.They're left bitter and resentful and without purpose and adrift and hostile and resentful and vengeful and arrogant and deceitful and, and of no use to themselves and of no use to anyone else and no partner for a woman. And there's nothing in it that's good. So you said, I mean, that sounds pretty bad. You're saying there's a crisis of masculinity.What do you do about it?You tell me you help people understand why it's necessary and important for them to grow up and adopt responsibility, Why isn't a shake your finger and get your act together sort of thing? Why it's more like, why it's more like.A delineation of the kind of destiny that makes life worth living. I've been telling young men but it's not, I wasn't specifically aiming this message at young men, to begin with. It just kind of turned out that way. And it's mostly, you admit, it's mostly men listening. I mean, 90% of your audience are men.That's about 80% on YouTube, which is a YouTube is a male domain primarily. So it's hard to tell how much of it is because YouTube is male and how much of it is because of what I'm saying. But.You, you, what I've been telling young men is that there's an actual reason why they need to grow up, which is that they have something to offer, you know, that that that people have within them this capacity to set the world straight and that's necessary to manifest in the world, and that also do so.Is where you find the meaning that sustains you in life so what's going wrong then oh God, all sorts of things have gone wrong think that I don't think that young men are here with words of encouragement some of them never in their entire lives as far as I can tell that's what they tell me and the fact that the words that.I've been that I've been speaking. The YouTube lectures that I've done and put online, for example, have had such a dramatic impact as an indication that young men are starving for this sort of message because like, why in the world would they have to derive it from a lecture on YouTube Now they're not being taught that they that it's important to develop yourself.Does it bother you that your audience is predominantly male? Does that isn't isn't that a bit divisive? No, I don't think so. I mean, it's no more divisive than the fact that YouTube is primarily male and Tumblr is.That's a pretty bicycle, isn't it? Tumblr is primarily female, but you're just saying that's the way it is. Well, it's, I'm not saying anything, it's just an observation that that's the way it is. There are plenty of women who are watching my lectures coming to my talks and buying my books. It's just that the majority of them happen to be men.It's what's in it for the women though.Well, what sort of partner do you want? Do you want an overgrown child or do you want someone to contend with that's going to help you? Women have some sort of duty to help fix the crisis of masculinity, which depends on what they want. No, I mean, it's it's exactly exactly how I laid it out like women want.Deeply want men who are competent and powerful and, and I don't mean power in, in the in the in the, in that they can exert tyrannical control over others. That's not power, that's just corruption. Power is competence. And why in the world would you not want?Competent partner, Well, I know why actually, you can't dominate a competent partner. So if you want domination, dominate. Is that what you're saying? No, I'd say women who have had their relationships impaired with impaired their relationships with men.Impaired and who are afraid of such relationships will settle for a weak partner because they can dominate them. But it's a suboptimal solution.There's not a lot of women are doing that, I think there's a substantial minority of women who do that. And I think it's very bad for them. They're very unhappy. It's very bad for their partners, although their partners get the advantage of not having to take any responsibility. But what gives you the right to say that? I mean, maybe that's how women want their relationships, those women. I mean, you're making these vast.Generalizations. I'm a clinical psychologist. Brett TV. You're saying you've done your research and women are unhappy dominating men. I didn't say they were unhappy dominating men. I said it was a bad long-term solution. OK. You said it was making them miserable. Yes. Yes. And it depends on the time frame. I mean, there can be there's intense pleasure in momentary domination.That's why people do it all the time, but it snows the formula for a long-term, successful long term relationship. That's reciprocal, right? Any long-term relationship is reciprocal virtually by definition. So let me put a point to you from the book where you say there are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men.The areas of study dominated by the postmodern stroke, neo-Marxists claim that Western culture in particular is an oppressive structure created by white men to dominate and exclude women. But then I want to put, OK sure, but I want to put to you that here in the UK for example, let's take that as an example, the gender pay gap stands.Just over 9%. You've got women at the BBC recently saying that the broadcaster is illegally paying them less than men to do the same job. You've got only seven women running the top FTSE 100 companies. So it seems to a lot of women that they're still being dominated and excluded, to quote your words back to you.It does seem that way, but multivariate analysis of the pay gap indicates that it doesn't exist. That's not true, is it? I mean, that 9% pay gap, that's a gap between median hourly earnings between men and women. That exists. Yeah, but there are multiple reasons for that. One of them is gender. But it's not the only reason, like if you're a social scientist.Worth your salt. You never do a univariate analysis like you say. Well, women in aggregate are paid less than men. OK, well then we break it down by age, we break it down by occupation, we break it down by interest, we break it down by personality. But you're saying it doesn't matter if women aren't getting to the top because that's what's skewing that gender pay gap, isn't it? You're.Well, that's just a fact that's not going to get to the top. No, I'm not saying it doesn't matter either. You're saying there are multiple reasons for it. Yeah, but those reasons why? Why should women put up with those reasons?Why should women be content not to get?They should put up with it. I'm saying that the claim that the wage gap between men and women is only due to sex is wrong, and it is wrong. There's no doubt about that. The multivariate analysis has been done.So I think you've been talking about might be very dynamic. I'm saying that a 9% pay gap exists. That's a gap between men and women. I'm not saying why it exists, but it exists. Now if you're a woman, that seems pretty unfair.You have to say why it exists, but do you agree that it's unfair? If you're a woman and on average you're getting paid 9% less than a man? That's not fair, is it?It depends on why it's happening. I can give you an example OK.There's a personality trait known as agreeableness. Agreeable people are compassionate and polite, and agreeable people get paid less than less agreeable people for the same job. Women are more agreeable than men. Again, a vast generalization. Some women are not.Yes, that's true, but that's right. And some women get paid more than men. So you were saying that by and large, women are too agreeable to get the pay raises they deserve. I'm saying that that's one component of a multivariate equation that predicts.Salary. It accounts for maybe 5% of the variance, something like that.Surely we are about another 20. We needed about another 18 factors, one of which is gender. And there is prejudice, there's no doubt about that. But it accounts for a much smaller proportion of the variance in the pay gap than the radical feminists claim. OK, so rather than denying the pay gap exists, which is what you did at the beginning of this conversation, shouldn't you say, to women?Rather than being agreeable and not asking for a pay rise, go and ask for a pay rise. Make yourself disagreeable with your book. Oh definitely, there's that. But I also didn't deny it existed. I denied it existed because of gender. Because I'm very, very, very careful with my words.So the pay gap exists. You accept that. But you're saying, I mean, the pay gap between men and women exists. You're saying it's not because of gender, it's because women are too agreeable to us for pay rises. So one of the reasons, OK, one of the reasons. So why not get them to ask for a pay rise?We've done that many, many times in my career and they just don't, oh, they do it all the time. You can. It's so one of the things that you do as a clinical psychologist is assertiveness training. So you might say.Often you treat people for anxiety, you treat them for depression.And you and, maybe the next most common category after that would be assertiveness training. And so I've had many, many women, extraordinarily competent women in my clinical and consulting practice and we put together strategies for their career development that involve continual pushing, competing for higher wages, and often tripling.Ages within five years and you celebrate that, of course. So do you. Do you agree that you would be happy if that pay gap was eliminated? Because that's all the radical feminists are saying. It would depend on how it was eradicated and how the disappearance of it was measured.And you're saying if it's at the cost of men, that's a problem? Oh, there are all sorts of things that it could be at the cost of. It could even be at the cost of women's interests. So because they might not be happy if they get equal pay? No, because it might interfere with other things that are causing the pay gap that women are choosing today, like having children.Well, or choosing careers that happen to be paid less, which women do a lot of. But why shouldn't women have the right to choose not to have children? Or the right to choose those demanding careers they do? They can, Yeah, that's fine. But you're saying that makes them unhappy?By and large, I'm saying that No, I'm not saying that I'm I, and I haven't said that so far. You're saying it makes them miserable? No, I said that what was making them miserable was having part was having weak partners. That makes them miserable, right? I would say that many women around the age of, I would say, between 28 and 32 have a career, or family crisis that they have to deal with. And I think that's partly because of the foreshortened time frame that women have to contend with Like women have to get the major pieces of their life.Put together faster than men, which is also partly why men aren't under so much pressure to grow up. So for the typical woman, she has to have her career and family in order pretty much by the time she's 35, because otherwise the options start to run out. And so that puts a tremendous amount of stress on women, especially at the end of their 20s. I have to take issue with the idea of the typical woman because, you know, all women are different. And that's why I want to just put another quote to you from the book. You say in some ways and the same in others. OK. You say women become more vulnerable when they have children, and you talk to one of your YouTube interviews about crazy harpy sisters. A simple question is gender equality where are we?
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