Center of the universe
orangecoast.com
orangecoast.com
For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.
Seems with the popularity of sites like chatroulette and cam4 more and more guys are either secretly or openingly experimenting with their curious sides.
*Why is this getting downvoted are hacker newers homophobic? The author notes how much the encounter excited him and how he thought about how it excited him throughout the years. I don't see this being an unreasonable question to ask.
EDIT: Actually, the reason for the downvotes is probably the fact that it has nothing to do with hacking.
I found the article itself very interesting, actually. Morbid of course, it's a serial killer story. I didn't get the impression that the killer was idolized though, it was more a description of how far almost-superhuman charisma can go and what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of it.
What disturbs me in this story is the described hypnotism. The snake almost manipulated the guy who is clear as day about having not one bit of interest in the same sex. To make him strip is brain washing. Had the marine been attracted to the same sex, I would be less disturbed.
Now consider the following. Perhaps it is not me who is intolerant, but perhaps you lack perspective. Bear with me, I bore with you: Imagine that the story was of a sadistic straight rapist. The almost-victim must be completely uninterested in sex; if you cannot imagine such a level of purity, imagine a lesbian. Now imagine that someone comments on the survival story of this kind that she wrote using words like "wonderful". Is that a normal reaction? And then someone asks the almost-victim if the experience has made the victim less willing to have sex with men. Now you're coming from the same place I'm coming from. (cue people calling you a bigot)
FFS. No-one is saying that this guy meeting a serial killer was wonderful. They are saying that the writing is.
Certainly the trope is common in fiction. See: The Mentalist (both the protagonist and antagonist share this ability) and several Agatha Christie novels with similar storylines.
This guy sounds like a real-life Red John; able to subtly re-wire people's thinking so that they actually want to do what he suggests.
I have only ever experienced this in the formulaic pattern of dark-arts sales tactics. Israeli companies selling cosmetic products from the Dead Sea are notorious for making a superficial connection with their potential customers and then exploiting that connection for a sale. But those tactics aren't hard to see through and resist. Quite scary to think that someone who has mastered those techniques could actually alter my preferences simply with the power of suggestion.
It's scary to realise how powerful it can be. Once, one in of the guys had a girl who took two contract phones come back in utterly disbelief at what had happened about a half hour later: this was no ordinary buyers remorse.
The only way to avoid it is to not communicate with those people.
It helps with nearly everything you do in life. I find it amazing and scary.
I was twice targeted by timeshare resort companies. It's really high-pressure, but it's endless fun to see them escalating salespeople, from the junior interns to the really experienced mindbenders. From praising you for your success, to criticizing you for not living up to what was expected from you at your point in life.
Great exercise.
I think most people are completely unaware of how true this is. As students and tech geeks, we've all probably met someone whose talents seemed otherworldly -- mastery of Quantum math, able to punch out code like Notch, that sort of natural intellectual athleticism that seems like something they must have just been born with.
Well, in boardrooms and marketing departments, in politics, in places of power and sometimes just in random situations, there exist people for whom the ability to (at least seemingly) 'connect' with other people at a deep psychological level is similarly off the charts, in the vanishing 6-sigma rightward tail of the hump.
Of those few people, some percentage, say 1%, were additionally born without anything like a normal conscience. They are incapable of feeling guilt or the normal sort of empathy that makes one feel the suffering of another soul.
I believe that those are, for the most part, the people in charge of things.
The interesting combination for me is those with such "emotional intelligence" in that they can read people and figure out their motivations and feelings, but they don't have a significant empathic response, and they appear to feel little or no guilt in utilizing these perceptions for personal gain, regardless of the pain they inevitably cause to those who trusted them.
I mean, hearing about a gay guy doing this creeps me out as a straight guy, but really a lot of this is going on in bars as we speak and is generally a mutually satisfying experience.
Yes, and no. Being "too direct" can be fantastically effective if you can back it up with sufficient confidence, and can manage to make it look natural rather than creepy.
It works exactly because the confidence and making it look natural thing is rare enough to make you stand out in a way that often produces very rapid and strong attraction. E.g. in a bar, it shocked me years ago when I realised how easy it is to get random women to make out with you just by going up to them and telling them you want to, and start to lean in slowly but surely (slowly, because unless you want things to end badly you want to make sure it is easy for her to leave/tell you to fuck off or similar if she doesn't want to). And often your best bet is actually when you get rejected initially. That is when you really prove whether you're just confident and having fun vs. being a creepy: if you laugh it off and seem to not care, it amps attraction; if you act as if you were caught doing something bad, she will treat you as if you were caught doing something bad.
But the fundamental difference is end-goal: It is "easy" to create quick, strong rushes of attraction (e.g. lifting a woman up on the dance floor and swirl her around out of the blue; or help an old lady across the road in front of her or any number of simple things can amp attraction massively), but the quick rushes of attraction subside equally quickly if you can't keep up the tempo (and most of us have no hope in hell of that).
The systematic, incremental approach on the other hand is much easier to make last: You don't just amp up attraction, which can be very fleeting, but you get her (or him) used to acting a certain way around you, and you around her/him, and you get the person used to complying, and used to acting a certain way around you, and our desire for consistency is intensely strong and helps reinforce our willingness (or desire) to act the same way. People also tend to mirror the strongest "frame": If the person with the most confident demeanour acts as if someone is totally natural, people will tend to "fall in line" and accept it as natural too (and then rationalise why to themselves even if they are totally unaware of any reason). Couple that with innate desires to please and for attention etc. and it becomes scarily powerful in the wrong hands...
So having said that, it's kind of tricky to pinpoint what was creepy about this guy and what's kind of fair game.
I mean, my feeling is that it's almost anachronistic to get worked up about this in 2013. Before he killed anybody, this guy got off the hook incredibly easy for drugging/raping a minor (and getting caught red handed!), as I understand was often the exception more than the rule before the 1980's. There was a recent story about how a lot of the decrease in crime is partly due to smaller gateway crimes like car theft becoming less common - I wonder if society's more vigilant stance on rape in recent decades could have had a similar effect.
Also, as common as it is to hate social networks, how much safer would this guy be if they'd done the standard 'Hey, you're cool, let's add eachother on Facebook' or 'Can you text me your address'? A minimal digital 'paper trail' would probably give a guy like this a lot of pause, and if he'd been hesitant/weird about those interactions, it'd probably be even more of a clue for even a young guy.
I guess being a serial killer is an iterative process. You start clumsy, and develop the technique. You probably lack the inhibitions that stop you from psychological experiments on people.
I'm sure a plausible liar could persuade me that there was a reason not to give me facebook ("oh, hey, my mom is on there, and she'd ask me questions about all the guys I keep adding" would probably work on me) or other interactions.
Not to be too pedantic about a hypothetical, but that would give away his ulterior motive a whole lot sooner. I only quibble because there are a thousand ways that modest technology use could snag someone or raise red flags. What if someone had called him on his phone while he was hanging out with this guy? "Oh I'm at the corner of x and x hanging out with a new friend". What if he took a picture of that guy? What if the occasional GTA session and hooking up with dudes on hook-up sites sublimated a lot of the killer's darker urges? Or what if, in a more connected world a lot more accepting of gay people, he just moved to Maine and bought a house with a boyfriend?
I'm sure we can go back and forth about a lot of things like this, but the bottom line is that there has been a massive reduction in violent crime in the last decade or so; I think technology has been a major factor.
In this case, I would hazard most straight guys who read this article and feel disturbed are disturbed that someone can induce a state of homosexual attraction within them. Further, aside from the obvious fear of homosexual attraction, there's also the empathy for women who are subjected to methods like this.
It's easy to rationalize some form of this behavior as "fair game". Would you still consider it fair game if you put yourself in that Marine's shoes, or in a woman's shoes, being subject to methods like this? Maybe, maybe not.
The sociopath sees his victims as an object, as something that he can play with and exercises his power. He gets off on being able to take a straight guy -- and I suppose, one idealized in the form of an ultra-macho Marine -- and seduce him, the power to turn him into something he is not. (Then kill him).
No one likes being treated like an object.
I've seen this kind of rationalization in many of the pick-up artist material, rendering the person into an object. Sometimes, the rationalization covers up their own sense of helplessness and impotency ("Stop putting women on a pedestal!" "Some people are afraid of the power of these techniques!") But that covers up the main issue: there's a particular shadow side to masculinity, where lust consumes the brain and the person who attracted you stops being a person and becomes an object to fulfill that lust. Further, it is related to another shadow side, that men want to feel that they have power over women and can conquer them. (And likewise, some women know this and exploit this emotional vulnerability).
There is some wisdom in the sociopath, in particular, being detached from being consumed by impulses and emotions. Sociopaths though, lack empathy. They lack the ability to feel as others do, and so will do some destructive things.
It's entirely possible to use the methods from the PUA community with empathy (and perhaps, compassion) ... but you know, in order to do that, you first have to get in touch with your own emotions. Most men tend to be wimpy about going deep within themselves or surrendering to truth and wisdom.
— № 2, The Prisoner, The Chimes of Big Ben
This is a great technique because most people's beliefs about most things are shallow and weak. Anyone even slightly versed will quickly flip those ("You know what we call a system with no unemployment? Slavery.") but you can chip away at what seems like very fundamental convictions (democracy, human rights, capitalism, heliocentrism...) with relative ease because most people have never been confronted with any half-intelligent criticism of those.
Partially, it's a problem of our education system rewarding recitation of canonical answers. Fundamentally, humans have not evolved to be philosophers.
The worst part, when applied to how we reason, is that being smarter can actually make it worse. I've sometimes found myself arguing for some downright idiotic positions because I made an uninformed declaration early in the conversation, and then found myself compelled to defend it. If I were dumber, I might run out of things to say and stop talking in those situations. Instead, I have from time to time actually convinced people - or at least convinced them that my ignorant position was worth considering.
Being smarter makes this effect worse, usually because someone who is smart (or likes to see themselves as smart) and likes to argue, are typically disconnected with their emotions, not because they put argue themselves into a corner. They seek social acceptance by being right, often because they lack emotional skills to work with acceptance and rejection.
It's not really about being dumb or smart. It's really having attachments to self-image. There's this maxim: if you have no pride, then you have no shame. Without attachment, you let your self image go, and the shame goes along with it. You laugh at your folly and have a good time :-)
I will note, the methods the sociopath used on the Marine is pretty much the same kind of methods pick up artists use for seducing women, even down to the "you have to get them away from their friends."
The same problem comes up when you talk about psychology. Yes, the evolutionary cause for consistency pressure is to prevent rejection, as rejection could easily lead to death for early humans. But that does not mean that the psychological basis for consistency pressure is fear of rejection. High level psychological phenomena are a beautiful solution for an ever-changing environment, but with relatively constant factors (like rejection -> death), hardwired instincts are far more reliable.
That doesn't mean that fear of rejection as a high level phenomenon doesn't also exist. There's no optimizing flag in our brains that says "If there's an instinct to handle environmental factor X, ignore X while adapting". But those high level phenomena do not motivate our instincts.
So given the universality of consistency as a need during most of our evolution, and the apparent universality of consistency bias as a flaw in human reasoning, I would give a very low prior to it being something you could reprogram by "digging it up by the roots". Rather, overcoming consistency bias is likely to require high level compensation techniques.
It doesn't matter how much you know or don't know about rejection. What matters more is how you feel about rejection and your skills at working with emotions.
In any case, I suspect what you are doing in writing that response is exactly the process I had described: the use of intelligence and knowledge to avoid actually being aware of what you are feeling and underlying emotional currents.
Digging up the roots work. There's a little bit more to it than that. However, I don't have an interest in convincing you that it works. :-)
"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F.S. Fitzgerald.
http://www.orangecoast.com/webexclusives/2013/09/24/a-factch...
Some things to think about related to the experiences of the author. At the time of coming into contact with Randy Kraft he had already killed at least 20 people, and during that year had committed at least 5 separate murders. Pretty sobering to think about.
Also, reading these details I can't help but be extremely critical of the criminal justice system's failures in regards to the case. There were so many opportunities to catch Kraft in the earlier days of his "exploits" that were wasted by either poor police work or poor judgment of the district attorney.
You can't help but feel outrage that nobody stopped him... that the public wasn't sufficiently warned that any of these boys, these kids could have known there was a serial-killer stalking them.
For instance, when they caught him, the front passenger seat of his car was apparently bloodsoaked, but was never matched to any known/suspected victim. A fair amount of evidence suggests that he had at least a part-time accomplice as well. All sorts of unknowns, as he still maintains complete innocence to this day.
He had been killing people in Oregon, on business trips up there and the folks up there theorized that something like this was happening and had been working credit card gas purchase, car rental, and airline ticket info and from what I read, right around the time he got arrested in Ca. his name was coming to the top in Oregon.
When the police officers (John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish) arrived, Dahmer managed to convince the them that it was a gay lovers' quarrel and the officers let Dahmer take Sinthasomphone home again.
Can you imagine the horror of escaping torment and certain death, only to be handed right back to your tormenter by the police?
... reading the other wikipedia article, Dahmer had also performed an experiment on him that would've also impared his cognition pretty severely. I'm not going to write the details since it was NSFL, but I'm surprised people didn't notice it.
That's not disturbing at all.
"Shortly after his enrollment as a freshman at Claremont Men's College, Kraft enrolled in the Claremont Reserve Officers Training Corps[16] and he regularly attended demonstrations in favor of the Vietnam War and — in 1964 — for the election of conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Kraft later declared these actions were merely a mimic of his parents' political views and not his own, describing his second year at Claremont as being when he abandoned "last gasp" of conservative ideology.[16] The same year, Kraft entered his first known homosexual relationship."
Not in the slightest. If that paragraph had said "democrat", but every other word was the same, I'd have pointed it out.
I'm disturbed that in an alternate universe we could be reading about Kraft's reelection campaign.
Vigilantism is not the answer.
Both serial killers and politicians (and CEOs) have sociopathy in common. It's not a huge leap to imagine such a universe. Think of all the innocents killed at the hands of the current slate of US politicians.
But it's interesting to think why is author still alive. Is killer possessive gay that is willing to kill guys that are ignoring/rejecting him? Because author didn't reject him as many others that are now in the grave?
Also, even if author is wrong, really interesting and non-intrusive emotional overview.
I do have two questions, though:
1. Polaroid wasn't making a black and white integral film in 1980, and FujiFilm didn't make instant film until 1981. Kodak's instant film was color. So how did Kraft produce an instant B+W image?
2. Did you really drink 2-3 beers and then get on a motorbike?
2) We used to do a lot, lot, lot worse than that in the USMC in those pre-MADD days. Different era.
Fun fact - same motorcycle, I was struck by lightning on it several months later, riding home from California (to Ga) on I-70 in Missouri. This was following my discharge (actually, end of active service) in late August.
2-3 beers over the length of time in the story would leave you well below the legal limit and your motor skills would not be impaired unless you never have alcohol, which he clearly stated wasn't the case.
Tldr. Cut the melodrama. It's like being shocked when someone has a beer and walks down some stairs.
The name of the linked article is "Center Of The Universe". Not sure why they want the two titles to match but they do now.
Could it be that this is done by an automated script? :/
FWIW, I originally titled this "The Crack Of A Twig" and we were rolling w/that title, but at the last minute, the editors at OC Mag asked if they could change it.
I'm not a pro writer by any means, and going through the process of editing a feature article w/a print mag was pretty interesting.