The Psychopaths who Should Have Crushed my Spirit

They Didn’t. I made it to retirement as but the shale and husk of the person I should have become and, as long planned, will now begin to chronicle every last one of the psychopaths and malignant narcissists who chose to tread on me during my long and turbulent career in technology, be it commercial, industrial, military, scientific or academic. I’m on a tight schedule to get this project started, as I must soon return home to where the psychopath assigned to me in retirement will be waiting to resume his attacks and try every trick in the book to drag me down and keep me in a state of perpetual torture, manifesting the instinctive habits of any psychopath from which even the criminal courts have been unable to dissuade him. I don’t even know if I’ll survive my first physical encounter with him. That adventure is summarized in a video I put together to explain to my audience in forensic philology the long gap since my last post almost a year ago.

No sector is free of these lurking monsters, who wear the mask of sanity socially so that only their victims even know what they are and how they’re systematically dismantling their lives. If you’re the typical middle manager who most needs to know this, you’ll stop reading now because you don’t make it to middle management in a strict hierarchy with opinions of any kind, nor with any desire to acquire them. This allows the corporation itself, over time, to assume the collective port of a psychopath. See “The Corporation as Psychopath” in “Snakes in Suits” by Babiak & Hare if you think I’ve concocted this out of whole cloth. It’s real, it’s been with us since the rise of societies in prehistory, and it’s here to stay until we solve the problem the way social problems have always been solved: with these things we call laws — the pride of every civilization since the dawn of time if we are to believe their written legacies. Civilizations have always prided themselves on their laws because their laws accumulate and systematize their lessons learned. Laws showcase their experience and understanding of the way things work and of how to self-regulate in consideration of same. Writing the laws is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to write, but you’re halfway there once you’ve cast religion aside and reduced a new problem to its root cause.

This will be a living document to be updated in perpetuity until the changes taper off, the author dies and only the Wayback Machine and Bibliotheca Alexandrina maintain archives of this narrowly-focused experience of a lifetime. I will start with the notes I made during the 14 years and 4 months from 5 July 2011 to 9 November 2025, then complete the uncompleted parts, flesh out the rest, review the chronology, add events not covered and grow everything from there. I will extend this post in parts, in numbered subsections that can later be reorganized into a chronology. It should be noted that the original numbering is not necessarily chronological.

I recommend that everyone do the same so that one day our body of knowledge about the social predators in our midst will overwhelm both common knowledge and hopefully the legislative agendas of the near and far future. Most people want desperately to have nothing to do with this subject, which psychopathology pioneer Dr. Hervey Cleckley recognized early on as the main problem. Handling the predators, after all, is something upon which any zookeeper can advise. People in general know the predators are there, breathing down our necks, but just don’t want to turn around, let alone look up and confront them. Anecdotal libraries like this will eventually surround everyone and force the lawmakers responsible for mitigating the problem into action.

01 INTRODUCTION

I will leave family out of this essay so as not to disrupt the carefully curated world views of my siblings. Besides, my mother’s fraternal (dizygotic or non-identical) twin sister sent a long letter to all of us explaining her sister’s history and psychopathy in layman’s terms. Since then, of course, my mother’s psychopathic fiction has had decades in which to overshadow, supplant and consume her sister’s eyewitness chronology in my siblings.

The BIG QUESTION I’ve often wondered about is how the psychopath convinces those they lie to not to repeat these lies to the victim of their wiles without raising suspicions on the part of those to whom they lie. Rationally, those listening should want to hear from both parties but end up not wanting to hear from the victim. The BIG ANSWER, as those familiar with fraudsters and their methods know, is not in WHAT the fraudster says but in HOW they say it. Everyone falls for the confidence ploy in a world overflowing with distractions from alert and rational thinking. The fraudster spreads the lie with PATHOLOGICAL CONFIDENCE and with just the right measure of SUBLIMINAL THREATS. To hear from the victim would be to face the terrible prospect of confronting the psychopath, which those being lied to instinctively know is a better description of the fraudster telling the lies. By virtue of his DELIVERY STYLE, they are already instinctively afraid of the fraudster, and of the possibility that the person behind the mask is truly evil. Even Greta Thunberg famously refused to believe about climate deniers and pollution profiteers in her UN address that they were truly evil. In this way, the psychopath is protected by the extremity of his or her own evil, and by the audacity to dare people to suggest its existence, let alone question it to their face, or become a target by spreading a questioning narrative.

To the torrential fictional narrative of the average psychopath, reality gives way like a rickety wooden fence in a dam break. As with any torrent, the damage done by these fictional constructs is permanent and irreversible, surviving their authors’ mostly silent victims, thus made all the more anonymous by concealing who they were or ever became, into the nethermost reaches of eternity. Like the last whiplash of the Balrog, they lash out, reaching far beyond the grave and drawing their catch irretrievably down into the abyss to keep it company in eternity, satisfying their pernicious authors all the more for every tug of resistance they feel. Only physical laws are more permanent, but not even the movement of the celestial bodies they guide are more certain to succeed in their mission of vengeance for the crime of escaping their unconditional wrath to the farthest reaches of the globe. The evil that roils within these creatures will find its way.

Babiak and Hare (Snakes in Suits, 2006), referred to hereinafter as B&H, divide the corporate psychopath’s modus operandi into three phases: Assessment, Manipulation and Abandonment. In a corporate technology context (and most probably in many others) this typically translates into Assessment, Availing Themselves of and Taking Credit for the Victim’s Talents and finally Giving Them a Bad Review. (They’ll easily figure out how to give you a bad review whether or not they’re officially authorized to do so.) They also discuss the ten basic personality disorders and distinguish them from psychopathy, as well as three variations in personal style among true psychopaths: the Classic style, the Manipulative style and the Macho style. Corporate Bullies are described as a variation on the Macho style and Corporate Puppetmasters as combining the features of the Manipulators and the Bullies. They compare the Corporate Puppetmasters to Stalin and Hitler and consider them the most dangerous subtype amongst the classic psychopaths.

In a sense, corporate psychopaths think hierarchically rather than rationally, manipulating fragments of the rational milieu as suit their needs to promote or maintain their place within the social hierarchy. This way of thinking has been formalized in Confucian philosophy as it is taught and applied today in business and government in certain eastern countries, principally China, its country of origin. Because this “Machiavellian IQ” operates independently of a person’s “Rational IQ”, there would remain in a given individual a greater or lesser capability for rational thought to operate in coordination with hierarchical scheming. Hierarchically wired as many psychopaths appear to be, however, I would posit that above a certain threshold, the Machiavellian IQ (MIQ) predominates over the rational IQ (RIQ), subjugating the latter to a supporting role in the causes and courses of Machiavellian scheming. Those with an MIQ above this threshold are often ill-equipped of themselves to deliver useful goods and services whose production would require a dominant exercise of rational thought and action. They advance instead not by merit but by using others whom they perceive to be vulnerable as stepping stools, kowtowing to their superiors on the one hand as Dr. Jekyll whilst berating their prey as Mr. Hyde on the other. Perverting truth and stapling unrelated facts together into a semblance of rationality by which they cast their rivals in an unfavorable light, they thus promote themselves by contrast each to the corresponding straw man thus built up in their psychopathic fiction. Most of the people with whom they preferentially surround themselves – even those among this group who think rationally – are no less deceived by this lexical sleight of hand than are their most devoted and ardent sycophants willingly blind to them. It is thus not without considerable cooperation, be it willing or unwitting, that corporate psychopaths deftly reverse the true polarity of this contrast in the eyes of those around them. Their tell-tale signature for those willing to step back and look for it is an endless stream of beguiling verbal emoticons as I put it in The Way of Ages (2010). This is the outward manifestation of a round the clock, round the calendar influence campaign that would quickly wear out a normal person were they instructed to maintain it. Think of the spinning plates act in the repertoire of the Chinese acrobats. A moment’s inattention and it would all come crashing down. Perhaps for lack of sufficient training or experience in critical thinking, the vast majority of people are too readily and completely taken in by such histrionic whirlwinds and never pause to consider the merits of stepping back to reflect on a broader purview of their environment and of the stranger denizens that swim within it.

Today with more experience behind me and having had more time to consider the question, I would substitute “opportunistic” for “hierarchical” to describe the operation of psychopathic minds, which sorts better with academic views and with their use of “machiavellism” and “machiavellian” behavior patterns. If the writings of Machiavelli can be summed up in a few words, he taught and promoted the unabashed and unhesitating exploitation of the often fleeting opportunities that present themselves in ordinary life. In this view, a predator’s manipulation of the social hierarchy would be just one manifestation of this opportunistic modus operandi.

Although I did not come across any clear assertion of it in B&H, the one truth about psychopaths of which I from my own experience am thoroughly convinced is that each and every one of them is vividly and intensely aware of who and what they are, for the depth, breadth and constant, time-sensitive pressures brought about by their unrelenting and labyrinthine schemes could scarcely allow room for self-delusion. Those amongst the rest of us with any doubts at all can therefore rest at ease. If you were, you’d know it. You’d love every minute of it. Not only would you not give a hoot but you’d be altogether incapable of fathoming the concept of a qualm. You’d have no reservations about anything and be living and running on constant automatic.

Of the personality disorders that B&H discuss, I shall mention the Narcissistic variety and add that I have personally identified several individuals socially who fit this profile but who also display the full range of behaviors the authors attribute to mainstream psychopathy with such subtlety and skill as to be undetectable without close and retrospective scrutiny over extended periods of time. I did this long before it became widely known that US Presidential candidate and later President Donald Trump suffers from NPD and began to weave his now famous torrent of fiction and rhetoric. Despite my long prior experience, it took me just as long if not longer than anyone else to realize this. B&H indicate that when Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) shades into antisocial and destructive behaviors it is characterized instead as “…aggressive or malignant narcissism, which is difficult to distinguish from psychopathy.” In listing the common practical elements of these behavioral syndromes, I have suggested elsewhere on this blog that this difficulty may reflect the lack of any real distinction at all given close enough scrutiny on the one hand and a wide enough purview on the other. Those with NPD weave a social fiction, for example, with a form and purpose that’s not easy to distinguish from the psychopathic fiction understood and agreed upon scientifically as a manifestation of psychopathy. The case of Donald Trump is useful in this context as a case of which few on earth today can claim ignorance. Each and every one of us knows damn well that he exhibits all of the behavioral traits listed in the article referenced above (serial social predation, pathological opportunism, a fluid fictional narrative and a penchant for gaslighting), yet the experts will tell you that he is afflicted with NPD but not psychopathy. Applying Ockham’s Razor, we might explain this difficulty by abandoning any attempt to distinguish between the narcissistic and the psychopathic fiction on the one hand, and between narcissism and psychopathy on the other. The experts already agree on several distinct styles of psychopathy, so why not just add one more and be done with it? Everything falls into the same pattern when one stops treating NPD differently and starts to think of it as but a smug and smiling but no less genuine and destructive style of mainstream psychopathy.

Of the psychopathic styles that B&H discuss, I shall mention the Corporate Puppetmasters and add that I have personally identified several individuals who fit this profile. I will also suggest that these individuals exhibit serial aggression no different in overall style from that with which homicide detectives are familiar, and that from the perspective of the victims of these individuals the three phases are more aptly designated as Isolation, Control and Subjugation and Elimination after the community of contributors to the Tim Field Foundation page at http://timfieldfoundation.org/what-is-bullying. In this context, the Nazi Holocaust can be viewed as the Elimination phase of whom we might designate a Political Puppetmaster’s standard pattern – to remind ourselves, if nothing else, of the seriousness and potential scope of this subject matter.

I’ve also identified others in these and other categories that I’ve encountered in the past at various organizations, or who have come and gone from a single organization – but never representing more than the statistical estimate of one percent within a given organization that B&H indicate for the general population. Lest the reader suggest that I’m seeing psychopaths in my soup, therefore, I’ll suggest instead that the more appropriate question to ask is whether I’ve correctly identified two of the eight or nine psychopaths statistically indicated to exist within the extended (but geographically localized) organization in which they were encountered, given that it had not been subjected to any filtering process specifically targeting psychopathic personality traits.

I chose this time to report my findings to date, finding myself as I now do either at or near the end of a Corporate Puppetmaster’s Elimination phase. I would place my chances of still having a job upon return from vacation at about even. This is a far cry from where I was last year. (Within two weeks of writing this I was placed on layoff notice and was subsequently stonewalled from other jobs within the organization. I will defer discussion of the causal link between these events and the act itself of merely writing this very article in de facto isolation, let alone publishing it.)

POSTSCRIPT 2026: I’ve known since the mid 1980s that most of my employers have had direct and near-real-time knowledge of anything I write in private that might affect them, simply because those of weak minds are the rule rather than the exception in any social or administrative context and cannot keep a secret to save their own lives. This stems in my case from the early choices I’ve made in who I worked for but could as easily be true of you as well. Refer to Edward Snowden for further details.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: (Q) If A knows everything that B says, writes and does, who has the upper hand? (A) A has the upper hand. (Q) If B knows that A knows all of this, who now has the upper hand? (A) B has the upper hand. Just think about this and you’ll come to understand it. (Q) if A knows that B knows that A knows all of this, who now has the upper hand? (A) B still has the upper hand because A never knows whether anything B says, writes or does is genuine or misleading, and B can change this at any time.

In an effort to keep my experimental results, if we may call them that, as pristine as possible, I was careful to minimize my indirect reactions to the past few year’s sequence of events, to avoid altogether any direct responses to the Corporate Puppetmaster and just as importantly to defer the composition of this article until all of my results were in. I’ve applied similar discipline with respect to the NPD subject mentioned above since catching on to this person’s behavior patterns several years ago and matching them over time to those described in the psychoanalytic literature. Since 1995 I’d been writing a book on comparative philosophy whose subject matter began to blend in parts with that of B&H in the context of my workplace experiences – more particularly where the subject philosophies cited counterexamples to the prescribed behavior patterns. By the time of these most recent events over the past several years I had become keenly attuned to the machinations of these corporate denizens and decided it was time to formalize my research. My methods are no more or less subjective than those of B&H, as direct experimentation is categorically problematic where human subjects are concerned. As to my observations, it is hoped they will be considered as valid as any of those contributed thus far to the work of B&H or to serious victim communities such as the Tim Field Foundation. I kept those in my philosophy book as original and impressionistic as possible by deferring my full reading of B&H until after it was completed. I thought it more likely that they would contribute to rather than merely reflect the existing body of knowledge if made a priori in the context of the much earlier literature that the book is about.

Having completed my full reading of B&H, I’ve submitted my annotations directly to the authors in the hopes that a way forward can be found for everyone affected by these invisible monsters among us. In one place they recommend diplomatic accommodation, then strict avoidance in another. I fear alas that avoidance and accommodation will only allow the social problem to worsen over time. We do not simply avoid and accommodate serial killers, after all, so where is the morality in avoiding and accommodating those who wreak havoc and destruction over wide swaths of society, or who kill slowly but just as permanently?

02 THE NARCISSIST: NPD #1

It began with the slam of a door that jolted me half out of my chair. Every day around close of business, the office door across from mine would slam loudly as its occupant left for the day. Each day the signature slam grew louder. Offices with doors were a status symbol on this campus, whose legacy corporate culture was laced and stratified by everything from romantic associations to just such superficial accoutriments of rank and place. Perhaps the slammer was just making a statement to as wide an audience as possible. Or perhaps he was trying to get my attention. I was the new kid on the block and the slammer was not one to make polite social advances, preferring instead to let others to come to him. That’s what life was about for this person, as it turned out. Him. Sure enough, once he had gotten my attention, the daily slamming stopped. Either everything revolved around the slammer or he would slam it all to hell. Before we go into the details, let us take note of this singular motivating factor in a person with NPD that makes them so destructive: they will systematically steamroll the elaborate machinery of their social engineering sham over any attempt to remove them from the limelight or to shift the limelight onto someone else – even for the briefest moment.

What came across initially as a cheerful and gregarious nature turned out after a good year of being taken in hook, line and sinker as the perpetuation of what B&H have labeled the psychopathic fiction. Everything, it became increasingly clear over time – everything, including not just the cheer but the full range of emotional displays – was the manifestation of an elaborate simulation to which this person had devoted his entire life. The autobiography he set forth early on was that he’d done most of the work toward a PhD in astrophysics but had turned away on principle from completing his thesis due to irreconcilable differences with his advisor. On the verge of demonstrating his mathematical prowess to me by working through a series of equations with pencil and paper, he paused without having laid down a single stroke and began lamenting his imperfect memory. I was completely taken in and tried to reassure him that it would all come back with a little practice. I caught him secretly smiling at this through his abject look of self doubt. Refelcting on this episode months and years later as his lifelong ruse began to gel in my mind, I saw myself more and more as just another choice idiot who had fallen for the neverending story of his psychopathic fiction and dutifully taken up arms in his defense. I’d been a shining example of a minor player in his palatial house of cards both served and guarded by a shabby shanty of gullible dupes.

The first thing to note in a person with NPD is the constant reference to self. The first clue that prompted me to look deeper into his overall behavior pattern was the most prominent picture on the wall of his office. It was a picture of himself, smiling warmly back at himself all day long as though in constant approval of his every device of social engineering and his every affected emotion. The second clue arrived by way of an anecdote the subject told a group of his minions – which included myself at the time – about the day in his childhood when his sister hit him over the head with a shovel after he’d toppled her castles in the backyard sandbox. The story was told in such a way as to garner even more sympathy for himself than we had already heaped upon him so thickly and so gullibly to date. As time wore on, however, his sister’s violent act became increasingly recognizable as the natural expression of a sudden moment of clarity – a reaction to the sudden realization that she was dealing with a monster wholly insensitive to her most basic rights and feelings as a human being. Since then, of course, the subject has since reeled her back into his circle – reluctantly, perhaps, and most likely with a grudging, arms-length understanding.

The only times I’ve known this particular NPD to speak with admiration of another person are those in which he described a relative who had landed a teaching job at the Sarbonne, the venerated liberal arts university in Paris. The point of his admiration seemed to be the way this relative had secured and maintained this job without the use of any notable qualifications. The truth of this story or even of its principal character notwithstanding, the impression I took away was that the NPD had an abiding admiration for Machiavellian scheming and especially for anyone who could parley it into a career. Indeed, I would not be surprised to discover that this mythical schemer was just another made-up character in the NPD’s neverending psychopathic fiction designed to confer upon himself yet one more histrionic modicum of prestige by proxy. I asked him some time later what had happened to this mystery Machiavellian and he did not at first seem to know what I was talking about. Under a default mask of knowing recollection that gave him time to think, he finally said something like “Oh yeah. That guy. I never found out what happened to him.”

While true of most people, it is especially true of people with NPD that the more you let them aggrandize themselves without question, the more you unchain their narcissistic frenzy and the more they will consequently reveal to you in due course. Don’t let them know you’re on to them and they will reveal ever deeper clues to their true nature. At one point during an automobile ride (read: safely out of earshot of all known skeptics), the subject began to refer to himself quite unabashedly as a saint. At another while others were distracted at the conclusion of a luncheon – frustrated by my having ignored him for the last 5 minutes or heaven forbid for yet longer – he grabbed away an after-dinner mint exclaiming “Mine!” as though suddenly reverting to the age of nine.

This externalized reverence for self is all-pervasive. Were the subject to read this article he would instinctively revel in the warmth of attention it unavoidably heaps upon him before thinking to object. The reason is simple: This article is about him. No matter how scathing it becomes, he will never lose sight of the fact as he reads it that it’s about him. Though it would be easy for him to do so, to turn it around and make it about me would shift the limelight away from himself, which would strain every fiber of his being. Within seconds of discussing it with others – seconds, mind you – aided by a fundamental emotional disconnect called semantic aphasia – he will have diverted attention away from any unfavorable treatment and deftly converted the conversation into a showering of warmth about his jolly old self and how egregiously he’s been victimized – just the way he molded the anecdote about the day his sister hit him over the head with a shovel.

The second thing to note in an NPD is the extraordinary combination of long-term strategizing (on the order of years and decades) and short-term tactical manipulation (on the order of seconds and minutes) to which the subject has resolved to constantly devote himself, or to which his condition has involuntarily committed him. But before we begin to sympathize with someone who may not have a choice in how he behaves let us consider that what for lack of a better word might be called evil does not become good the moment we begin to discover ways to elucidate its underpinnings. To put it more bluntly, evil explained yet evil remains, defining evil as working to the common detriment vs. good which we may define as working to the common good.

A point I will reiterate later lest we lose sight of it in the tangled underbrush that psychopaths cultivate around themselves is that we need not ask ourselves how anyone, psychopathic or not, could possibly engage in such extensive Machiavellian intrigue and still perform the functions listed in their official job description. The answer is as simple as it is stunning: they don’t. Their scheming is a full-time job. It does not augment their ostensive duties but replaces them altogether. It is a simulation in lieu of a job. It is the psychopathic fiction, which forwards the subject’s ulterior purposes and at the same time substitutes for the official duties it is carefully designed to simulate, or the neglect of which to distract attention from. It is what they do. This is their only livelihood and it can be lucrative indeed.

One way to detect such a denizen from this perspective is to make note of how it operates. As noted in the psycoanalytic literature, the corporate psychopath moves from one (genuinely productive) victim to another and histrionically displays a semblance of productive work by proxy, appearing to mentor, lead or counsel the victim. The victim is the real leader in these situations but the psychopath knows how to reverse that relationship in the context of public perception. The psychopath also knows how to follow up in the eye of the body politic by taking full credit for any resulting accomplishments. The Narcissist in my case would make sure that any such unsolicited “counseling” session was within earshot and/or visual range of community members he deemed to be qualified witnesses and always raised his voice to the level needed in order to ensure the clear and unmistakable propagation and perpetuation of his psychopathic fiction. Precisely timing and placing his followup conversations with the vicim in earshot or visual range of the same or other such strategic (even if unwitting) witnesses, he would brazenly phrase his comments or questions so as to confer credit upon himself even for things the victim knew full well he was undeserving of credit, as though challenging the victim to challenge him on such points. To do so, of course, would afford the Narcissist the opportunity to raise his voice even higher and press his points, turning the perception around so as to convey the appearance in the eyes of the body politic that the victim was unfairly depriving him of credit he richly deserved. I for my own part learned early on not to fall for this tactic, demonstrating my accomplishments instead through independent channels at times and places wherein the Narcissist was not present. Informed in no small part by my understanding of Sun Tzu, this created independent countermoves that he could not directly confront and thwart, which in turn allowed this counter-perception to take hold and spread before he could discover it and stem its flow.

After expending his credibility with me, I noted in passing how the Narcissist would in subsequent weeks be seen in the offices of my successor victims, “counseling” or “directing” them as he had me. Over time he would run thus through every likely victim in a given organization before circling back to the first, or before hopping over to another organization to accentuate in the eyes of the body politic his “versatility” and “universal demand”, all the while eluding notice and accountability for his lack of material contribution, not to mention for his monumental waste of time, effort, money and morale. Like a shark (most species of which must keep swimming to avoid suffocation), he had to remain constantly on the move, scouring new social territory every week. Were he to stop for too long, a critical mass of normal folk were bound to catch on to his predatory habits.

Come time for seminars or symposia, the NPD would participate if he could, but again only by proxy. In one such “talk”, the Narcissist’s victim presented the body of work, after which the Narcissist stepped in and offered just enough vague and redundant words of commentary to convey the impression that he was the true mastermind of the presentation, when in fact the victim had done everything. This modus operandi also made it easy for the Narcissist to avoid having to respond to direct questions about the subject matter. On the one hand, the victim had given the bulk of the presentation; on the other, only the victim had spoken in terms clear enough to intelligently question. Notwithstanding, the Narcissist was well-practiced in giving substantively vague yet linguistically impressive answers to direct and specific questions.

As alluded to above, the most striking basic element of the NPD’s daily modus operandi is the extremely short time scales upon which they operate. Within seconds – yes, seconds of entering any conversation or of a change of topic, they will steer, slant or pervert the discourse into something about themselves. Directly or indirectly the discourse will either shower them with accolades or they will take whatever course is needed to scuttle it altogether. Either way, nothing productive or beneficial to the greater good will ever come of it. To that they will most assiduously see, lest the limelight stray too far from their favorite subject.

I mentioned above that romantic associations formed the basis of many of the positions of power, status or recognition in the decidedly backwater legacy organization forming the context of my encounter with this subject. Just as in Imperial Rome, ties of caste and marriage held far more sway than merit as the gauge of a person’s standing within the organization. The NPD capitalized on this social bias by playing up his married life to the single men with whom he would preferentially surround himself socially. Safely external to the organization, his wife would be none the wiser to whatever use he might feel compelled to put his marriage in a given social context. Although by the same token such an extra-organizational marriage held less sway in and of itself in promoting his status, it also left all of the limelight it might attract on himself and himself alone. The clue to this device manifested itself the day he invited his circle of minions to the wedding anniversary dinner that he and his wife normally took together. Only when neither his wife nor most of his minions could readily understand why he would want to invite comparative strangers to his wedding anniversary dinner did he reluctantly call off the outside invitations. As to the single men with whom he would preferentailly surround himself, he would constantly scheme to prevent them from one day sharing his limelight by discouraging, denigrating or surreptitiously thwarting any attempt they might make to acquire romantic lives of their own. Any who did he would promptly abandon.

”What is this crazy person trying to say about this poor gentleman?” some readers may now be thinking to themselves about my elaborate rants (about a third according to B&H were it required reading within a random population). “What has he done to deserve such treatment?” It would be difficult if not impossible for me to help you here except to say as I’ve said in other contexts that it is with the very absurdity of their motivations and the very subtlety of their tactics that psychopaths protect themselves. Who would ever believe that anyone could stoop so low? When the answer is “no one”, the psychopath knows that he or she has hit upon a viable scheme. Adolf Hitler was not so subtle when he said that while few will believe a small lie, if the lie is big enough, people will believe it. I leave to the reader any further responsibility for adjudicating the merits of this article.

The real fireworks lit off when I began dating someone who in the NPD’s mind might allow me to draw so much as the slightest iota of attention away from his own model family life, let alone the lion’s share of it. I was genuinely interested in the woman but by this time I had long since caught on to his scheming and was so distempered by it – but at the same time just plain curious about how he would react – that I felt the need to stir the pot. I dated this woman knowing that whatever else came of it, the affair would spite and agitate the NPD to no end, having long since decoded his use described above of his married life as a blunt instrument of social engineering and self-aggrandizement. I’d long since lost count of the times I’d sacrificed political ascendancy and ultimately my job in refusing to date someone whom one or another representative of the body politic had implicitly designated for me. This case was the opposite of that, as if flew in the face of a malignant narcopath’s self-promoting political designs. Dating the designated person had typically been the rite of passage – a show of political deference – at the gateway to a new position or status within the body politic. It was a way of placing me under political control as a precondition to entry into, or de facto promotion within, an organization that I might otherwise be expected to disrupt through unwanted competence, process improvement or leadership. In this case, dating the woman was a slap in the face of a preening self-promoter who had no business giving a hoot about other peoples’ relationships to one another outside of office hours. She had just completed her contract work anyway and was entering into a period of leisurely but half-hearted job hunting. This woman came from within his own social circles, which made it all the more tempting to wrest her away and see how the monster would react.

As expected, this move deeply infuriated the Narcissist. Though it did not take him long to adapt, the agitation and emergency replanning it triggered in his mind was evident. At first, the NPD attempted to encourage my rival for her affections – one of his own sycophants – to counter this turn of events. He did not have to precaution, soften or otherwise qualify this encouragement but had only to step back out of harm’s way and hope that more damage would be done to me than to his always expendable sycophant. Failing that, he networked a sentiment of injustice toward my rival and of transgression toward me throughout his inner circle, who were all too eager to promulgate them. Failing that, he began to network socially through the woman herself so as to gain insight into my personal life. Exploiting her machiavellian side, he helped her to feel more socially accepted by sharing select details not only of our intimate life but of my financial life as well with his personal body politic, as though it were rightly expected of her. Over time, he thus turned her into a leak and ultimately a fire hose of sordid gossip and detailed spreadsheets aimed at undermining my image and thus any perceived threat to his central place within his world. The interesting part of this episode for me was that no one in his circles questioned this, as though everything he said and did was beyond criticism, above reproach and the very words and actions of an immanent god. No one stepped back for a wider purview to question the big picture of a social predator mining the personal life of a colleague, spewing it out into public view and calling for help in condemning it — perhaps for fear of drawing the focus and industry of his damage control algorithm and themselves becoming a target. At the same time, the woman’s live-in mother was beginning to make power plays toward me in an attempt at total domination, in which the daughter ultimately chose complicity. This eventually became so suffocating that I felt justified in exercising my veto power. I terminated the relationship with prejudice and the psychology experiment fell by the wayside.

These tactics on the part of the Narcissist did not stop there. They had in fact begun from day one and never ended. Two or three years before this, I’d been invited to speak at a local high school about a paper I’d published in an international aerospace journal some years before. I was still at the time a fresh entry into the NPD’s inner circle and none the wiser to his tactics. Just before leaving to give the talk, the NPD inquired as to the name of the school and of the instructor who invited me. I thought little of this rather detailed inquiry, as engineers as a rule tend to gather more detail than they know what to do with. Without speculating further as to the NPD’s subsequent actions, suffice it to say that I was never again to receive the same invitation, despite the instructor’s enthusiastic promise to do so at the conclusion of my presentation. My assumption is that this particular pseudo-engineer – the Narcissist, of course – was at no loss as to what to do with the last-minute information he’d so surgically extracted.

The list goes on and on, as such denizens as these seem never to sleep. This one neither seldom drank, suggesting to me that he was well aware of the concentration and constant vigilance needed for the proper execution of his labyrinthine contrivances. On social occasions I’d notice him sipping a glass of wine without substantively partaking of it, as though to encourage others to loosen up whilst himself maintaining a level of sobriety commensurate with the fulfillment of his unending schemes and with the alertness he would need in order to maintain the logical consistency of his psychopathic fiction, at least to the extent of the highest estimated attention span amongst the present company. To gain a full appreciation of the damage done by these monsters among us one must learn to integrate and multiply the few examples given across time and attempt to sum them up into a total damage estimate. To dismiss them all on the basis of any one such seemingly petty maneuver is to play directly into their strategy of plausible deniability by reason of patent absurdity. Just because you or I would not stoop to this level does not mean that the deranged among us are not perfectly happy to do so unceasingly from birth unto death, nor indeed that they are capable of any other course.

I would much later become involved in diversity organizations within the company and with their assoicated community and charitable activities. The NPD was involved in a token capacity with a black woman in her school mentorship and educational outreach program who had apparently asked him to ask me if I was interested in helping out. In relaying this invitation to me, the NPD added that it would require me to drive into troubled neighborhoods which he presumed I’d be reluctant to do. Already involved in another such group, I expressed to the NPD my reluctance to spread myself too thin but did not respond to the concern he apparently wished me to have about troubled neighborhoods. Without hesitation as though executing an already well-practiced maneuver, the NPD scurried quickly over to her office. Based only on subsequent inferences, I was led to the conclusion that he had planted within her the seed that I was reluctant to become involved in an activity that would require me to visit black neighborhoods. In the ensuing months and years I would find it increasingly difficult to dispel the resulting rumor which, having been so deftly and strategically planted, spread out like an insidious plague wherever I went. I believe my reputation ultimately overcame it but the experience only added weight and drag to the already odious burden of disinformation this monster had inflicted upon me and upon the entire organization. Only those able to form their own assessments were able to see through it, but even those were able to do so only after months and years.

Toward the end and for reasons that should by now have become apparent, the NPD and I did not speak for 2-3 years. Upon seeing me for the first time in months near my office he seemed anxious and uncertain about how to approach me. He hadn’t had a chance in a long time to gauge my thoughts or disposition, for which he was constantly on the alert with everyone. Knowing this, I kept a poker face just to play the game and to keep him guessing. Smiling back at me with his default chuckle as he continued down the hallway, I caught a glimpse in the sidelight of what I can only describe as a hesitant, uncertain mask of tensed facial muscles that seemed to form a ring around his face, casting all of the features within it into a sort of macabre bas relief. Like something one might expect to see on a porcelain Halloween figurine, it looked to me like a nervous default face in lieu of the five or six faces between which he hadn’t yet chosen as the one to put on for me. A month or two after that, upon meeting me in the hallway he began to recite all of his latest accomplishments and seminar talks as though we had spoken yesterday. No hellos, no concern whatsoever about how I was doing, just a plastic smile and a long litany of anything I might have forgotten to ask about him.

The pièce de résistance took place not long before the conclusion of the Puppetmaster’s elimination phase, in which he would succeed in ejecting me altogether from the organization. At this point the Narcissist was able to synergize his efforts with those of the Puppetmaster in solving me, his increasingly uncomfortable multi-year image problem. This episode would ensconce within me forever the depth and breadth of the NPD’s tactics and the mindless embrasure of these tactics that would make me reluctant in my subsequent academic research to separate them from the realm of psychopathy despite the prevailing sentiments within the psychoanalytic cummunity that NPD is different from psychopathy but sometimes looks the same. Everyone agrees, so to speak, that it looks like a duck and I think I’ve demostrated already that it quacks like a duck.

Perhaps a year or two after breaking up with the first woman mentioned above, I’d taken a neighborhood walk both geographically and politically outside of the workplace with a woman of high standing within the organization – a PhD with a background in particle physics. Although my intentions in this case were consistent with my desire to return to normalcy (which in retrospect I had no chance to do within that organization), no sooner had the NPD become aware of this preliminary dalliance did he begin to actively warn and discourage her from associating herself with me. I had gotten the sense based on candid conversations with her that she’d been fighting to carve an academic niche for herself within her sub-organization and that she was sensitive to political concerns, as was indeed required within the greater organization just for survival, let alone acceptance and stability – the two things she seemed most to crave above and beyond survival itself. This made it easy for the Narcissist to succeed in his divisive smear campaign. Both in deference to the lady and because I knew I had no chance to prevail, I silently allowed his success to stand.

A few weeks thereafter I found myself alone near close of business inside a closed (government classified) computer laboratory with just myself, the lady and the NPD. The lady had always been more anxious and enthusiastic than most to properly secure the lab according to procedure before being the last to leave. I knew this from having gone through this procedure alongside her many times in the past. To secure each of the two rooms we had to test each computer console to make sure it was locked and that no classified information was left either on the computer screens, on the printers nor to the best of our ability and judgment on any of the bookshelves or table surfaces. There was a front room and a back room, and she had just emerged from the back room not long after the NPD. She informed me that the back room was secure, which was meant to save us the effort of checking it again after the few minutes it would take us to finish our work in the front room. Upon seeing me confidently acknowledge her announcement – knowing as I did that she was one person whose work I needn’t bother to double-check – and proceed to secure the front room, the NPD returned immediately to the back room for a couple of minutes, then emerged and left. I knew as soon as he did this what he was up to. His unstoppable maniacal mind had instantly grasped upon a way to deepen the divide between the lady and myself and to get me in trouble with Security in the same stroke. If he ever even considered that his sudden seizure of the moment in pursuit of his Machiavellian maneuvering – petty to the extreme but more to the point comfortably beyond the threshold of plausibility – had compromised national security, he could not have devoted more than a second or two to this side of his actions; that is the mercurial speed with which he acted to avoid missing this fleeting opportunity to shore up his social standing against even so much as the imagined threat of the greater happiness and social standing of his peers. Sure enough, when I returned to the back room after securing the front I found a computer console unlocked. It hosted a shared account to which the NPD knew he could not be traced. There was nothing plausible for me to report to Security because it was normal to leave shared computer consoles unlocked as long as you’re not the last one to leave the closed area – which the NPD knew that he was not – but that I was. It was a shining example of the perfect crime but there was nothing I could do but correct it (lock the open console), finish securing the lab and leave. Just a few weeks later I would be gone from the organization and from the company.

Three months later, a small cadre of my former colleagues organized a farewell luncheon for me. The organizer and I had mulled over and finalized the guest list a week or two in advance. The NPD was of course not on that list (nor did I want to “blow my cover” unnecessarily and specifically exclude him from it) but not unexpectedly in retrospect, he did not fail to show up at the luncheon. One or two words and a histrionic handshake were all he needed in order to validate his sudden appearance, after which he exercised caution and slunk away to his own space down the table. This moment joined the growing list of moments that had reinforced my perception of him over time as more akin to a machine executing and re-executing the same algorithm within the constant flux of changing circumstances to which we are all exposed than a real person to whom the concepts of conscience, morality or monotony might apply. I had read B&H by then and was beginning to appreciate the growing sense within the academic community that psychopathy falls more under the control of genetics than of environment or conditioning, let alone cognitive learning.

Later in the luncheon, the NPD would not fail to raise his voice as he yammered out his usual endless stream of beguiling verbal emoticons just enough to edge out whatever he may have heard at my end of the table. The subject matter of his yammering belied an unsettling new twist. For the first time, he was yammering about the technical area in which I had previously worked under the chilling auspices of the Corporate Puppetmaster to whom we shall forthwith most bravely turn our attention. If it was what it sounded like, the NPD had been recruited by none other than the kingpin of all corporate psychopathy at that institution. If that was true then it was a near certainty that he’d been sent there specifically to spy on me, a mission all too well in line with his own agenda, letting alone the Puppetmaster’s. Out of the corner of my eye during the breaks in his yammering, I tried to glimpse the tensing in his muscles and the orientation of his ears whenever I replied to the people sitting next to me as to where and with whom I’d accepted my next employment.

03 THE NARCISSIST: NPD #2

I had a subsequent encounter with a different NPD about 19 months later. This time it took me less than 2 months to recognize the symptoms. This NPD, married like the first, asserted his preeminance over other married or engaged men by aggressively pursuing their wives or fiancees. This would have been a higher-risk variation on the MO of the first NPD except that the second NPD was self-employed; if he lost face he could simply disappear into another social circle. The first NPD, by comparison, would associate mainly with unmarried men and intercept any attempt at marriage or romantic relationships within his inner circle. He would then simply “excommunicate” from his inner circle anyone who succeeded in spite of his best efforts and then work tirelessly to “fix” the insult to his preeminance by sabotaging the new relationship.

The most striking similarity between NPD1 and NPD2 was their physical appearance and general bearing. They were about the same height – about 5’11 or 6 feet tall – and both were about 1.5 times their normal healthy body weight, most of the extra weight being concentrated in a large, protruding belly. Both had pitted facial complexions, both were always smiling and never at a loss for words. Both exuded an easy charm, but we already know that about psychopaths and NPDs. The working hypothesis I had developed during my 6 years of experience with NPD1 is that the NPD overeats for several reasons: from a purely psychological standpoint, to “feed his ego” and as a displacement activity for the high degree of concentration and stress resulting from incessant scheming, calculation, coordination and from the need to constantly update and revise his psychopathic fiction and to reconcile its various versions whenever they overlap socially; from a strategic standpoint, to fortify themselves for the myriad machiavellian threads they must juggle and interweave each and every day; and over time, to add by sheer body weight a physical threat to the verbal presentation of their many cons, distractions and deceptions. Add to the last possibility that NPD1 could often be seen tromping through the office spaces with an exaggerated air of sheer mass and overconfident momenutm, and that NPD2 deliberately related to me a story about how he had used his body weight to help escort a rabble rouser away just days before. This was probably made up on the spur of the moment but that is a separate question. Not long after regaling me this episode, the very same NPD launched an aggressive 2-week, broad-daylight campaign to concoct an excuse to be alone with my bride to be, culminating in what could only be described as a forced entry into our home. It took an ultimatum implying legal steps to follow to make him stop and then, quite suddenly, he disappeared into total silence. No apology, no reconciliation, just an abrupt abandonment and total silence. Like a robotic vacuum cleaner bumping into a wall he’d bumped into before with prior victims, it just reversed course and set off in a different direction.

Were an NPD to add body weight through physical training, after all, it would unavoidably build character and improve its mental health and thereby soon lose its grip on its manifold precious schemes. It is not that I believe that someone with NPD could actually improve themselves in any way. Babiak and Hare (2006) write, as noted again below, that “The reality is that there is no evidence that psychopaths derive any benefit from treatment or management programs.” Niether do they equate NPDs with psychopaths but my own long experience with both sorts (much longer in total, I suspect, than their own) inclines me to believe that NPD is just a more painless, outwardly friendly form of psychopathy every inch as heartless and with end results for their victims every inch as catastrophic. While there is no doubt that many of us would like to believe that those charming NPDs actually could improve themselves, my own experience corroborrates what B&H suggest about psychopaths: the mental disorder is the fixed parameter, the independent constant and the driving factor from which all of the other characteristics derive. Hope for improvement might make us feel better about dismissing NPDs out of hand but as rational beings we must incline to observation and empirical evidence. If our sympathetic impulses still cannot be defeated then let them rest instead on the knowledge that NPDs cannot be other than what they are and are therefore not responsible for their actions. Either way you lean, you can derive some degree of comfort in knowing what B&H do seem to agree on: that NPDs have no feelings to hurt. Of this I can give you my personal assurance. What I can also say for certain about these two cases is that their similarities did not end with the personality disorder. They were two instances of what is now, to me at least, a distinctive and highly recognizable phenotype.

03.1 TRUMP: NPD #3

So recorded: Let it be known for the record that the descriptions preceding of NPD #1 and NPD #2 were not materially changed after 2015-03-14 at 13:45 PST, well before Donald J. Trump burst onto the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and revealed to all – most particulary to the psychoanalytic community – that he too suffers from NPD. I had not suspected this myself until then, yet compare whatever you might know about Trump to the comparative analysis above under THE NARCISSIST: NPD #2. They’re all the same. Every last one of them, because it’s a highly evolved predatory syndrome that arose to exploit a social niche for the same blind reason that anything evolves: because at some level, in this case on the individual level, it works. Nowadays in the online forums and social media commentary, as others rant and rave about Trump’s “despicable”, “deplorable”, “shocking”, “stunning” and “jaw-dropping” behaviors, I simply point out that everything he does is symptomatic of his condition and that his condition and other psychopathy spectrum disorders should therefore be disqualifying for public office. Private office too for obvious reasons, as I always add, but first things first.

04 THE PUPPETMASTER

“Snake eyes,” I thought to myself as he began to tear into me. He’d left his office door open, perhaps to impress the woman in the office next to his, who after all was said and done seemed approving of his 3-hour tirade, casting me a scornful glance as I left the scene. Babiak and Hare’s “empty eyes” is more to the point, I would later agree, if not as Biblical.

By the surgical nature of their attacks in which they show one persistent face to their prey and another to everyone else, only a skilled and moderately successful puppetmaster’s victims are aware of their existence as such. The expression “I can feel it in my gut” must have originated in experience with these monsters, whose machinations over time are known to exacerbate the stress-related condition known as irritable bowel syndrome. I’ve set a goal for myself to write this article well enough to alleviate at least half of my own residual symptoms, which were first manifest in elementary school in the context of bullying. In early pursuit of this goal I’ll allow myself at this juncture the freedom to express my opinion of these people as the most singular embodiment of evil on the planet. Snakes and sharks are both formidable predators but kill only in self defense or to eat. Lions and tigers are warm and furry and can even be tamed. Even the captains of organized crime appear as but blameless and unpretentious products of their childhood environment in comparison to the reptilian corporate puppetmasters, apparently wired at birth for hierarchical thought to the exclusion of all rationality and empathy, who kill to rise and rise to kill. B&H associate this archetype with historical figures such as Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin. While Hitler and Stalin survived through police and military power, the puppetmaster survives through indirection, dissimulation and social espionage. They are Hyde to their prey and Jekyll to everyone else, thus eluding culpability for even the most heinous of crimes. As shall be well and duly illustrated, I do not lightly use the word “kill”. Actions are taken and people die; it’s only the connections between the two which are blurred, concealed and tacitly dismissed. They are serial killers who ply their trade in the guise of duty and civility, committing crimes against humanity for which no laws have ever been enacted. Their tentacles reach everywhere, both within the organization and beyond. They seldom commit errors and would destroy heaven and earth to cover one up. The rest of us seem to know this, for why else would we make it so easy for them to elude accounability? Voracious animals running loose in a city vying only for survival are not responsible for their actions, yet we would sooner pacify and sequester them than even so much as discuss the possibility of marshaling soulless predators who masquerade as human beings.

So there I was in his office with that tell-tale knot in my stomach that seemed part and parcel with what seemed at once both a lamentation and a wonderment at how one person could stand out in the bottomless yet calculating eyes of so many a predator in one lifetime. It would surely have told on other peoples’ faces had these predators been less selective. But then again there were other victims in this case – the last several victims in an unending line of the serial killer’s prey, though all but one had left the company. A victim who exposes a psychopath, however, in so doing unavoidably forces him or her to focus in particular on that one victim so as to minimize the spatial and temporal density of witnesses who can back up one another’s observations about the predator within the temporary bubble of tranparency thus created. Isolation of the chosen prey is an essential phase of the psychopath’s modus operandi, so when a victim cries out, the psychopath must instantly resort to outright slander and lies big enough to force people to believe them in order to avoid being the one to challenge the predator, thus forcing everyone but the victim into a feeding frenzy wilder than anyone could contain and and successfully label as such in the eyes of the body politic.

For the first hour and a half, the empty-eyed monster rambled almost incoherently, running down an incredibly long laundry list of accusations and opinions with at least one of which he evidently hoped I would differ. It was clear enough that he was trying to pick a fight. Most if not all of what psychopaths do is intended not to accomplish real-world goals or convey information but to elicit a response in those around them – a response which they can then channel and manipulate as suits their needs. Were I to fall into his wiles and retort, he could instantly escalate and begin to point fingers in earnest. Were I to successfully resist this temptation he would have to concoct and impute a response – a lie he can then easily bolster by quickly building around it a suite of counter-responses to make it so, as if sculpting his lie by the lost wax process. Others can plainly see his responses and are then all too eager to backfill the imputed response on my part – fictitious or not – to avoid having to even consider what would then remain as the only other possibility – that the predator is a raving lunatic. It’s much easier for them to assume the lunatic is sane because his victim is much less dangerous to cross.

At the halfway point in his vacuous tirade, the psychopath took a fascinating turn. One by one in their mind-boggling hundreds, he began to go back over the very same points he had covered in the first 90 minutes, with a macabre twist. On his second pass through, he was making or taking, point for point, the opposite accusation or the opposite side in each argument. Having failed on his first pass to elicit an objection, he was simply covering the rest of his bases, confident that his list was long enough that I wouldn’t notice the repetition. Surely, he must have thought, I can elicit an angry response on the second pass if only I can hit upon the right side of the right argument. With machine-like precision, he thus covered both sides of each and every point for the remaining hour and a half. He never seemed to tire, keeping an even, accusatory cadence without batting an eye. It was, in retrospect, a most formidable case of B&H’s Macho Style to a T. This is the difference, I’ll posit, between thought and calculation. Psychopaths don’t think in the rational sense the way, for example, that Einstein defined thought so much as they coldly calculate their situation within the social hierarchy and maneuver like a snake preparing to strike in accordance with the moment’s snapshot of their mercurial plan to achieve its next level. By this time I had already come to grips with the inevitable. Nuts is something that anyone can handle but nuts and in charge is always the beginning of the end. I knew right then and there that my time at this company or at any company within a 20 mile radius was limited but decided at the same time to stay on as long as possible and experience the systematic attack I knew must follow as deeply and richly as possible so as to come away with a rare story to tell that might bring to light such demonic schemes and designs as seldom or never the world is allowed to see.

It was a sunny day with a strange, pale overcast not unlike the Mars-like red pall we sometimes got when forest fires blazed somewhere off in the distant hills. I was walking betwen buildings when I met a small, soft-spoken, meticulous and kindly woman that I’d spoken with many times before over the years, mainly about real estate and about the mounting apprehension every homeowner was beginning to feel about the direction of the economy. She’d been born into a culture that encouraged unquestioning obedience to authority and was accordingly reluctant to report abuse of power at work, let alone name names, nor would she to me until much later. Up to now it had all been about real estate, her family, the economy and life in general. Today she seemed to drift like a ghost and complained of a tightness in her chest. Life was hard enough outside of work, let alone getting the job done and balancing work with home life. Today was different indeed, and I wouldn’t see her again for several months.

What a relief, I thought. A quiet, unassuming man of peace and tranquility with lots of meaty technical work that I could really sink my teeth into. “I never try to force people to do things my way,” he explained at the interview in a soft, sagely voice. “Everyone has a different approach, and we shouldn’t try to control them.” It was a job that carried some degree of responsibility for advising others on how to organize their work and he seemed to be setting the stage for a great job governed by a soft and easygoing philosophy.

Some of you may be thinking at this point that I’d met someone in this kindly asian woman with a bone to pick who could help me stand up to the puppetmaster and that this meeting would lead in due course to an epic struggle of Tokienesque proportions. Here was a female Gandalf the Gray and we were off to to battle with Saruman of Isengard and Sauron of Mordor. Others will have a wider range of life experience and will have already guessed at the real truth. No, this was not a mystical hero about to help me save the day. In meeting my quiet, meticulous colleague on a walk between buildings, you see, we’d already turned the clock back several months. In this quiet interview with the sagely manager we’ve turned it a week or two further back from that. So we haven’t even met the puppetmaster, let alone begun teaming up to overthrow him. I should say to be more accurate that we haven’t yet met Mr. Hyde, who already had a victim. Corporate puppetmasters work on only one victim at a time so as to keep them more completely and totally isolated. They might quickly lose control, after all, if more than one victim teamed up to voice complaints at the same time. One victim can be easily dismissed and suppressed but more than one is one step closer to a movement. The victims must be trapped in the puppetmaster’s web, lined up chronologically, never close enough to touch one another, wrapped in gossamer threads to the point of suffocation, sucked dry to the bone and thus eliminated one by one so as to minimize the risk of an uprising. No, the kindly man behind the desk was a softspoken man of peace – the distinguished Dr. Jekyll, and that kindly asian woman with chest pains and the heightened concern for her family was his then current victim, whom I would soon meet. Now that she would be gone for more than two weeks, he would be needing another human face to tread on and another human life to destroy.

Unlike in trench warfare, no one knew any of this but the victim, Dr. Jekyll and now me. Everyone else simply did whatever the puppetmaster told them to do, and believed everything he quietly asked them to believe. It was like magic. You know, the sort of magic you feel when you watch a nature documentary about the Cordyceps fungus and the way it invades the body and the nervous system of ants, imparting in them an irresistable urge to find an ideal, sunlit perch in the high canopy of the jungle from which the fungus can germinate and renew itself. Having found the perch, the ant then feels the urge to clamp down with its powerful mandibles and anchor itself before the now protruding fungus begins to consume everything inside its natural suit of chitinous armor from the inside out. This is how that quiet asian woman would have felt on the operating table as the scalpel sliced into her chest. The surgeons, rightly believing they were simply saving another life, would not have seen the invisible strings that guided every move of their gloved hands as the invisible Mr. Hyde grinned and plucked at them from above the table.

Jekyll shared the same office as Hyde and sat in the same chair but never at the same time. That would have been impossible. Though they occupied the same body and the same mind, they were far too different from one another to both be there at the same time. On that day in his office it was the kindly Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde was out and about, working to advance the career of his distinguished colleague. Neither one of them were qualified for the jobs they held but Mr. Hyde was a man of many means and of formidable talents far beneath the imagination of common folk. He could never be accused of overworking his minions because he wouldn’t know what to tell them. Mere overwork is the office of diligent professionals and happy employees who feel good about themselves and about what they do. People willingly overwork for a good cause or a good leader, or maybe even just for good pay or to keep their jobs. In a job like mine, it was easy to become so absorbed as to lose track of time. Mere overwork is heaven on earth compared to the dark, inexorable web of Mr. Hyde – a brisk walk in the open sunshine (or at least in the dawn and the dusk of it)! What puzzles and challenging courses await them at first light, and what joys and comforts when all is accomplished at the end of the day!

The tell-tale features were all there but on Jekyll’s face were all too easy to miss. Those fathomless, empty eyes could be mistaken for a sign of deep introspection and the unswerving, calculating gaze of a curious mind. They worked instead with untiring precision to notice my every inflection and my every response to his every nuance. “Is this a convenient stepping stool, or is it someone I should fear and flatter?” he was asking himself throughout the interview. “Should I show him Dr. Jekyll, or Mr. Hyde?” These are the loftiest heights to which this mind would ever soar. He was a predator of no higher than reptilian evolution debating whether and when to strike – sizing up his potential prey to ensure an easy kill should the decision go that way and studying every nuance in search of exploitable weaknesses. The distingiushed Dr. Jekyll, you see, worked as diligently for Mr. Hyde as Hyde worked for Jekyll. Together they made up an unbeatable team.

Classically symptomatic of a psychopath’s victims, I suffered from irritable bowell syndrome while working under his authority. I was not the only one. Everyone but his two or three most naturally obsequious minions voiced stress-related medical complaints under his command, and let’s not forget the soft target’s heart attack and surgery. Symptomatic of his own condition, the puppetmaster persecuted me well beyond his official authority and well outside of his organizational unit. Everyone watched with glazed-over eyes, or chose not to watch at all, and two or three with bones of their own making to pick even gloated, as he drummed me out of the company after an 8-year tenure that left me with a little less than $1,000 a month in retirement. I’m surviving on that and on my Social Security benefits as I write this. If all you ever do is your best work, the resentment builds up over time, fueled by the fictional narratives of social predators on the prowl who see you as a soft target, and spills over at moments like these.

04.1 THE ARGUMENT

”I want to make sure we cover everything,” he shouted in no uncertain terms. “We’re in the business of prevention and we can’t afford to miss a hitch.” On and on it went in his office. Up, down, back, forth, round and round it went. Dotting I’s, crossing T’s and ending up right back where we started last week. “Uh, oh, here we go again,” you’re probably thinking. Our hapless author recounts another scathing psychopathic tirade, hoping to garner our sympathies and join his quixotic cause against the nebulous forces of evil. Rolling your eyes, you begin to lose your focus and set aside this ponderous tome before it wears you thin. Right?

Wrong. The conversation was notional but that was a good guy – a mensch of a boss, a cool dude, a regular sort of fellow. I used to live for those meetings and would not hesitate to raise my own voice in reply, not so much for the content of the meetings as for the common purpose we shared in them for consummate professionalism and impeccable work products. I’d wake up early on such days to make sure I’d have plenty of time to prepare. We’d go round and round, savoring the rare opportunity to soar like eagles though surrounded by turkeys.

Well, now you’ve done it. You’ve read this far and have just been robbed. If you don’t feel violated, that’s good – it means that you weren’t robbed of anything you feel was of value. If you do then it’s probably because you were hoping to find a way to dismiss all of this rubbish and call me a feeble complainer. Quite the contrary, I siezed upon the opportunity to visit New York City around that time. Having grown up on the East Coast during the adolescence of that great city, I was hoping to find a loud, crowded and bustling deli because I wanted to remember what it was like to get yelled at. I’d been living in Southern California for 35 years and hadn’t been yelled at in 34. I wanted to feel alive again. Much to my disappointment, the rumors were true. In my long absence, the people of New York City had risen to the top in the polls and were now rated amongst the most polite in the world. The worst reaction I got was an expressionless sigh of intolerance from a subway clerk when I asked where to find the southbound line on my way back to Jersey to catch the plane home. A complete stranger noticed my confusion and pointed the way. Fiddlesticks! 6,000 sky miles and all I had to show for it were the frequent flyer credits and some fairly nice photos.

Like it or not, now you know. I’m not just a feeble complainer. Now you can’t turn your back and pretend the world is perfect without turning your back on rational inquiry. Now you’re saddled with the lingering possibility that maybe – just maybe I have something useful to recount. Something important and ominous lurking just beneath the surface of modern society. Well you’d be right about that except that the important and ominous something is nothing new. It’s as old as our species and probably older still. As old as the reptiles if you want to invoke Biblical metaphor. Yet how eager we are to dismiss it all and believe that life begins and ends with Monday night football – even at the expense of the silent suffering victims almost everywhere in our midst that many struggle day and night not to notice. Yes, I’d have to agree that Monday night football is as good a refuge as any.

04.2 THE PUPPETS

Sycophant. Bootlicker. Brownnoser. Doormat. Flatterer. Flunky. Groveler. Gladhand. Lackey. Minion. Parasite. Puppet. No psychopath ever succeeded without them. They seek out psychopaths as fervently as psychopaths seek out them, because neither sort can succeed without the other.

To succeed on the Puppetmaster’s team you had to be a puppet. To avoid harm on the Puppetmaster’s team you had to be either a puppet or so precisely and steadfastly neutral on every issue, so devoid of personal ambition as to remain virtually undetectable on his Machiavellian radar. Anyone who returned a blip and lacked the wherewithal to leave the team or the company would eventually become a victim.

This particular puppetmaster had two especially dedicated facilitators who went to great lengths to do his work for him. Let us refer to them hereinafter as Dee and Dum. Soon after he rose to power, these were the ones who put together the presentation he would later memorize and use over and over again to make himself appear knowledgeable. Dum was relatively quiet, while Dee, the Puppetmaster’s favorite spy, literally could not utter a sentence without dropping the Puppetmaster’s name. He was, in effect, the somewhat less grotesque equivalent of the raving lunatic ex-attorney sent first to attend the Transylvanian Count’s business – the institutionalized, insect-eating lackey from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Outside of these two, there was a particularly sinister looking lackey – call him Hatter – who was sinister not by native appearance but by the way he would cast narrow, threatening eyes about every meeting over which he presided in the Puppetmaster’s stead, taking copious notes on everything the Puppetmaster’s latest victim said. I know this because I was one of those victims. I mentioned it to an HR representative and presto! No more selective note taking. Tell him to do this, and he does it. Tell him to stop and he stops. On and off like a switch. No filtration, no moral or ethical adjudication, just mindlessly servile and ethically rudderless. To be honest, he reminded me of the SS officer in a late 1930s Nazi propaganda film who rallied the raving audience in advance of the Furer’s speech. Any competent technical manager without a prodigious memory, mind you, will take notes at meetings; it is the selectivity which, to the attentive eye at least, gives away the lackey spy to anyone who wouldn’t otherwise know better. He doesn’t need the notes for technical reasons but instead is just mindlessly serving his master’s whim.

04.3 BOGART AND BACALL

Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall demonstrated in The Big Sleep (1946) that it’s neither new, particularly out of the ordinary nor even unwise to judge a person intelligently over time rather than impetuously all at once on the basis of everyday sound bites. “You got a touch of class, but I don’t know how you’d go over a stretch of ground,” says Bogie over cocktails. “A lot depends on who’s in the saddle,” replies Bacall. That was 60 years ago. So why is it so uncommon in the early 21st Century to find a person who doesn’t get taken in by hucksters, con artists and psychopaths? Part of it is inbred as B&H have discovered; one might attribute more of this impetuosity amongst otherwise normal folk to the constant bombardment of advertising on commercial media designed to encourage impetuous buying, or to sinister but powerful politicians who discourage critical thinking through intimidation or by hijacking Dark Ages ideologies on pretenses of unassailable integrity or morality. Be that as it may, intelligent assessment over time is the only way to recognize psychopathic tendencies. Psychopaths learn quickly how to simulate sanity and ordinary emotions by gesture, manner, inflection and word usage but long-term behavior patterns are much harder to conceal from those willing to notice them. Psychopaths also choose the people they frequently associate with for their tendency to judge impetuously so that they can operate undetected by those on whom they depend every day to help them achieve their goals and to systematically eliminate those who are willing to judge them over time. Perhaps it is an inability or innate unwillingness to judge people over time that places two thirds of the population in B&H’s second and third categories of people – those who proactively identify with hucksters and psychopaths in the second category and those who can only say “What happened?” in the third category when questioned about their perceptions of a huckster’s just-unveiled deceipts.

I don’t expect many in B&H’s second category to be reading this essay, as they would tend to lack the required interest or attention span. Any readers in their third “What happened?” category should be advised to avoid asking themselves after each sentence “Do I do that?” or “Could I be a psychopath?” or “What’s he saying about me?”

First of all, you’re not a psychopath if you’re not sure. Uncertainty is one of the most reliable hallmarks of sanity that I for one can think of. Psychopaths and narcissists, by contrast, literally ooze certainty in everything they say or do. That’s where the “con” comes from in “con artist”. The term “con man” came into common usage in the 1840s to designate someone who swidles people by gaining their confidence. Creating the intoxicating illusion of absolute certainty is a common way to do this.

Secondly, in second-guessing every sentence you’re committing by implication a rather egregious act of what the ancient Romans called hubris (overconfidence). By his own declaration in Misha Votruba’s documentary film I Am Fishhead, it takes Dr. Robert Hare himself, a leading expert on clinical psychopathology, six months or more to recognize psychopathic behaviors in someone he’s been interacting with during all that time. Here is an experienced clinician and academic who lives, breathes and sleeps psychopaths and he can be interacting personally with a psychopath for six months or more without realizing it. Who do you presume to be such that you’d recognize one in a single sentence, or even in a single paragraph?

So please, if you don’t feel your skin crawl as you read further (placing you in B&H’s first category), at least try to defer judgment until you’ve seen the Puppetmaster over a stretch of ground. Hubris has been the downfall of many a powerful mogul, not to mention that of many an ordinary citizen.

04.4 DUE PROCESS

“Lessons learned”, growled the Puppetmaster in the midst of my status report – not to me nor to anyone in particular but just loudly enough to be clearly heard by those sitting closest to him, and with just enough sinister, ultra-macho conviction to discourage rational discussion. Not that anyone sitting close to him would dare to question anything he said, but by necessity there are defined procedures even for psychopaths to follow. Due process is not one of them. On the contrary, it is the one thing that psychopaths systematically avoid or circumvent, which can be thought of as the reason for its invention. The successful application of due process is the kiss of death to their every scheme and deception. The founding fathers of the United States of America lived in a time when it was terribly difficult not to know this in one sense or another, which is why they chiseled due process so deeply into the stonework of the Constitution, fearing only that time and weathering might someday erode their labors. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Ben Franklin is said to have replied when asked what sort of nation the Congress of the Confederation (1781–1789) had created.

What happened? I told you not to ask that but we really do have to stop here and take stock of what just happened. The short answer is “everything but due process”, and it happened all at once.

A Puppetmaster’s rational IQ can be high or low but their Machiavellian IQ is always high, by the definition of psychopathy, and would need to be exceptionally high in a Puppetmaster psychopath to enable them to concurrently manage a multitude of minions in seizing a multitude of opportunities as they present themselves and in avoiding a multitude of exposure hazards thus encountered.

04.6 GHOSTING

Fast forward to the 2020s and a practice called “ghosting” begins to circulate in rumors and on the job seeker forums. Ghosting is a practice that has recently become more commonplace, in which an employee simply fails to show up one day and is never heard from again. I believe that in many cases, social predator attacks like this are behind them, as they were in my case on a later occasion at a different company, a case to be covered separately herein. The employee disappears without comment for a combination of reasons that he doesn’t have to think about because they’re overwhelmingly obvious in context:

• He or she is taken off guard and bewildered by a shock attack — a logically vacuous turn of events;
• No path to redemption is offered. It’s walk the plank or be keel hauled. No arguments.
• No one objects (the dead silence is the biggest shock of all, really);
• He or she already knows from experience that no political support is forthcoming — that the predator’s political network is all-encompassing, fully indoctrinated and unassailable.
• Anyone he or she calls upon for support will turn a blind eye to the plain-as-day absurdity of the attack and try to play both sides of the situation, as though the poisonous snake were a fuzzy caterpillar and the situation a picnic on a sunny day in which everyone just has to fall into agreement, which is code, of course, for doing whatever the predator has ordered.
• It’s The Twilight Zone on stereoids.

No one this happens to has to think about it, not even for a moment. You pack up, go home and never return. No decision you’ve made in 5 years has been as morally clear and easy to make as this one, yet no one back at work has any idea what happened, or if they do will never admit it. No one, that is, but (1) you, the victim and (2) the predator who just pounced. Those with any inkling of what happened are not going to say a word, or will beat around the bush and promote the both-sides sham. Deep down, you know that. Gone and done. They’ve just been ghosted, and now you know the meaning of the term from first-hand expierence.

05 THE PAROLEE

I was working on my computer outside of a popular Pasadena cafe when I had occasion to speak with a self-described recent parolee (recent as in “yesterday”) who gladly volunteered his life story. There was no room inside the cafe but I needed the wifi signal and so became his captive audience there on the sidewalk. He looked to be in his late forties or early fifties and told me all the details about the time he was shot, his arrest at a young age, that he hadn’t been with a woman until late in life – you name it. As I began to feel the inexorable pull of his personality it didn’t take me long to infer that he would (and probably had) ranked very high on Hare’s Psychopathy Check List (PCL) but had been deemed no threat to society at some point on his road to freedom simply because, well, there he was, back in open society.

You should also understand that knowing that I was in the presence of a psychopath to me was like knowing that it might rain tomorrow, having been raised by someone who probably ranked even higher on the PCL and having spent the better part of my life under the aegis of one or another psychopath, each in turn as they took unwritten numbers, had their turn and passed me on to the next. To me this was just another day, just another psychopath. I had work to do and wanted to get back to it, so I did so and just let him talk. It wasn’t terribly absorbing work but did call for a certain level of concentration.

As I began to concentrate more, I began also to notice something that had never before presented itself to me in quite so stark a fashion. The more I concentrated, the less reactive my facial expressions became to what my new friend was saying. The less reactive I became to what he was saying, the less and less he would say. Finally at the point of my greatest focus and concentration on what I was doing, his babble that had reduced to a trickle eventually ran altogether silent. Each time he noticed or thought he might have noticed a slight inflection in my expression, he would start talking again but his word count per minute seemed bound in phase lock loop to how much or how little I reacted. He never interjected with anything like “Hey, you, I’m talking to you!” or “Just let me know if I’m talking too much.” Instead his attention was focused keenly on my face, as though it’s every nuance guided his every word or line of discourse.

I realized then, and later more fully, that he was trying mindlessly, by some innate programming, to “get under my skin” and establish a psychopathic bond. On the converse side, I’ve found in my own experience that it’s harder to “read” someone when they’ve got a lot on their mind. Rational thought, the perennial key to success in life and for society itself, is utterly inscrutable from without because it displaces emotions, and with them, emotional responses.

Whatever its virtues as expounded by the classical philosophers, I later reflected, Stoicism revealed itself to me through this experience as the best defense against the inexorable pull of the self-serving psychopathic bond. If you think the threats and talents of the psychopathic mind or the subtle courses of Stoic philosophy are too esoteric to be useful in daily life, ask yourself how many societies, states and fully-developed cultures throughout history have been utterly destroyed and consumed by the psychopathic pull of a single individual for lack of the democratic processes to thwart such threats. Stoicism must have been invented specifically to counter this threat, bringing with it the science, logic, methods of rational discourse, democratic checks and balances and legal processes with which it became more widely associated in the wake of the classical Athenian era.

06 RAH, RAH, RAH

That’s the sound of the “macho” style of psychopathy mentioned in “Snakes in Suits” by Babiak & Hare. The content could be anything, and so it’s best to notice it early, perhaps from down the hallway, before you get close enough to start picking out the words. The Romans called foreigners “barbarians” because the speech they couldn’t understand sounded to them like “bar-bar-bar”. The key to recognition is not in what the social predator says but in how they say it — in the histrionic delivery style they substitute for rational content. Like everything social predators (con men) do, it’s a confidence ploy. Speak always with an air of absolute, almost threatening confidence and most of those listening will think twice before questioning your logic. This is the bread and butter of the macho-style psychopath.

Babiak & Hare usually mention the “puppetmaster” and “macho” styles of psychopathy in association with one another, attributing both, for example, posthumously to both Hitler and Stalin. Personally, I’ve never encountered a macho style psychopath without also noticing puppetmaster behaviors in the same predator. This makes sense considering that to build a psychopathic fiction and control its fluid content over time, the social predator must ultimately solicit the cooperation of a large number of enablers occupying key positions within the social hierarchy, feed each of them a tailored version of the narrative and update it as needed to keep that version consistent with those fed to others, or just to keep each enabler “warm” — you know, as in the spinning plates act of the Chinese acrobats. That’s true puppeteering in the development and maintenance of the psychopathic fiction.

One piece of this puzzle I’d like to see someone expose in the academic literature is real-world examples illustrating how the psychopath convinces these key enablers to keep the fiction he’s building from his current victim. What yarn does he weave to ensure that he can continue building his narrative free of the complicating encroachment of open challenges and rational critiques? It’s hard enough to smooth over logical inconsistencies as he adapts the narrative to changing circumstances without having to deal with the additional complications of fending off contravening narratives, so whatever the details of its application, the importance of understanding the technique in an academic context should be obvious.

And what is the psychology in those enablers of not noticing or not caring what it means when someone brings them incriminating accusations couched in caretaker language and packaged with an admonition against leaking this narrative to the target of the accusations? What prevents the enabler from putting two and two together and recognizing a frame-up when they see one? Absent more details on this from the field, I must provisionally attribute at least part of the success normally achieved by these predators to their choice of enablers and to their skill in preconditioning them for the task at hand. Remember, the predator need not be a genius to orchestrate this any more than a bird needs blueprints to build a nest. They just have to have the highly evolved behavioral syndrome bestowed upon them by nature, boot it up at birth and loop on its algorithms indefinitely.

I was interested in this job on its technical merits but also to satisfy decades of curiosity I had harbored over my father’s experience at the same company back in the 1970s when I was still in high school. It was the reason we all moved across the country from Massachusetts to California back in 1974. He didn’t last long here either and I was curious to gain some insight into why. His drinking problem was undoubtedly a factor and much time had passed since then but still, I wanted to learn more about the company first hand as it presently stood.

The macho-style psychopath I was hired to work for had been operating a revolving door while international project deadlines loomed on the horizon. Let’s call him “Macho Man”. Throughout my tenure on the project, several distinguished scientists and engineers had left the project. Some of them had disappeared, as would I in good time, without explanation, raising enduring questions in partner institutions as to what in the hell could be wrong with ours, although “what out of hell” would better describe the reality.

One of these engineers who ended up departing in the traditional manner had been a mechanical engineer and the principal engineer on one of two sister projects in our bailiwick, the three of which would collectively represent the US contribution to a major international undertaking — a sister project that Macho Man had effectively sidelined — brazenly in a teleconference in an office full of project participants — leaving the principal engineer to twist in the wind with nothing to do. As the software design engineer on said sister project, I had just come up with a list of use cases for it, since no one else seemed to know what a use case is. I’m convinced that Macho Man terminated our near-term participation in this project to avoid presenting to the remote group my list of use cases, knowing that the needed expertise was also missing from their group. This manufactured for Macho Man the manifold opportunity to (1) reinforce his fictional narrative that I didn’t know what I was doing — openly supported by one of his minions who himself had no clue what a use case was, even after I had explained it to everyone in his presence; (2) heading off any exposure of my expertise in this area to an outside group who could at least evaluate my use cases objectively and beyond the political influence of Macho Man; (3) justify the indefinite sidelining of said sister project and with it the threat he saw in its principal engineer. There in the 5 to 10 minutes it took to blow off the remote group and tell them to come back with their own list of use cases as soon as they got their act together, the US contribution to the international project had dropped from 3 to 2 subprojects — just to avoid showing them my list of use cases.

As I will repeat later in this essay, The twofold danger in dealing with psychopaths is that of overestimating the nobility of their objectives and of underestimating their talent for achieving them.

Back in the present, someone needed to be found who could satisfy the impossible combination of both technical and bootlicking skills. My interview took place even as my predecessor struggled with the technology and a most favored bootlicker lurked in the background ready to step in and take credit for everything I did. That was the macho man’s plan: suffer the humiliation of sucking it up while a complete newcomer is brought in to plan out the project and work it through technically, then make it look like the bootlicker was the shadow warrior behind the planning and execution all along, then deftly eject the newcomer and slip the bootlicker in to take his place.

Macho Man’s plans were cast in concrete one day after I had responded in a group email reply to his call for reviews of his latest project document. I can plainly see now in retrospect that this was never intended as a call for productive critiques, rather, he was simply presenting his minions with the opportunity to fawn over his most perfect work product. Back in the moment, however, I had long advocated for the use of the active voice in technical documentation as an industry-standard way to keep up the interest level and suggested we all make the same effort, demonstrating in the email the difference, e.g. “this was written in the passive voice by Benny” vs. “Benny wrote this in the active voice”. What did Macho Man do in response? Being the psychopath he is, and that he suspected by then that I knew he is, he naturally took us all down to a basement meeting room (I presume with the intent of precisely limiting any witnesses to those he believed he controlled unconditionally) to announce that everyting that I (yes, that’s right, he organized a crucifixion meeting just for me) had done to that point was of no value and had to be redone. The mafioso had brought everything but the baseball bat. The bootlicker was not invited, I think, for the practical reason that he worked 30 to 40 miles away at another plant, but also for more obvious reasons: to make it harder to see through Macho Man’s simple preference for bootlickers over people who might do a better job, and harder to see his cartoonish plan for what it was — to replace me with said bootlicker as soon as he could blaze a political trail to accomplishing that goal.

Long since hardened to such attacks, I side-stepped it altogether and pressed home my recommendation that we all start using the active voice in our documentation. For a moment he actually lost his self control. Seething for the briefest moment to the point of hyperventilation, he quickly regained his hardline, macho delivery style and with it his control of the narrative. To me, having been long since hardened against such public flayings, the interesting part had nothing to do with the two players I understood most: me and Macho Man. The interesting part to me was how every last one of the several other project members present — all of them sporting PhDs and publication histories — seemed able not just to keep quiet but to avoid altogether even the slightest projection that might have suggested that they recognized an abnormal situation unfolding before their eyes. To save their own skins, they lowered their heads, played with their mobile phones, shuffled papers or did anything they could think of to stay in character — to help Macho Man normalize the wildly abnormal, even bestial defense mechanisms I had awakened in him and that he had been unable to physically suppress in the moment.

The bootlicker’s job at this point can be summarized in the single detail he contributed to every technical meeting: “I understand the controller will be connected by a USB cable.” You know, like the nine or so USB cables connecting my computer to the hub and backup drives in my home office as I write this, and that I use to maintain a distributed backup regimen of my own creation against catastrophic data loss — a regimen I describe for the general public in a book on the subject. “Connected by a USB cable”? Really? What manner of rocket science is this? He was paid handsomely for recycling this idiotic status report while I powered through the work products and liaised overseas with the international project organization over the 3 years I remained at this job. But it didn’t matter. The bootlicker’s one job of the moment, for months on end, was to remain present, look busy and be ready to step in, a job so absurd that no one who noticed dared expose it as such. They would tell themselves instead, again and again to avoid controversy, that there must be something more to it.

Leading up to the overseas presentation event, Macho Man orchestrated and built up the fictional narrative he would use to justify the replacement event once all the work had been done to complete the current phase of the project and once the reports had been prepared and presented at the overseas project site. Leading up to the onsite report delivery, the opportunistic maneuvers he executed that come to mind are as follows.

• Staged a fake debate between me and the bootlicker to legitimize the vacuous sham the macho man had assigned to him with which to masquerade as a legitimate contributor. I had my design graphic and the bootlicker had the picture he had lifted from the primer that everyone had been given months before.
• Shopped the state definition document I had completed around to find someone willing to redo it and claim it as their own.
  • Knowing I had used it to help him with his own document, the first such prospect, a himself a highly productive and respected academician, returned it to me, which infuriated the macho man to no end.
  • Not understanding it a whit, the prodigious CAD engineer who had produced the high-level structural and mechanical schematics for the entire installation, also returned it to me without delay. Some days later, I would notice him leave at the end of a workday through the opposite end of the building, only to reverse course once outside on his way to the parking lot. This allowed him to escape the notice of the macho man on his way out. To me, it was a very familiar pattern, so it came as no surprise that the CAD engineer had quit or been let go not long after that.
• There was no mystery here, at least not to me. Folklore in jest around the hallway was that no one who was assigned to my office, just a few doors down from the macho man, ever survived more than a year or so. I was the exception to that rule but noticed over time that the same was true of other offices even closer to Macho Man. It was a glaring statistical anomaly that no one had bothered or dared to investigate in search of corporate psychopaths.
• As detailed below, the macho man even took the extraordinary step of renaming my design reports at the last minute and choreographing an unorthodox presentation stunt to make the bootlicker (licking his toy boots back at the home office) look like the true architect of everything I had done.
• The subterfuge was precisely timed but not precisely enough to prevent the macho man from missing the early flight he would take to polish up his fictional narrative at the overseas project site in advance of our presentations. Not the bootlicker, mind you, because he had done at most a few hours’ work over the months it took to bring the project forward from inception. Macho Man either couldn’t convince management to send him or didn’t want to expose him to the overseas project staff outside of his fictional narrative.

06.1 THE TRAVELING CIRCUS

As to the overseas presentation trip:

• I asked to be left out of this trip, as it was clear to me (and apparently to no one else) that Macho Man wanted his bootlicker to present in my place and was otherwise likely to embarrass both me and the company.
• Seemingly oblivious to the political situation despite my confidential communications and status reports, and knowing that it had been me and not the bootlicker who had prepared our contribution along with several other documents, management held firm and insisted I go. So I went.
• Macho Man’s minions all agreed to stay in the same hotel with Macho Man and depend on Macho Man to rent a car and drive them around like toddlers.
• One of Macho Man’s minions told the secretary to include me in this Mother Goose parade, so I had to tell her otherwise. My wife and I stayed in a hotel next to the bus terminal that had become the go-to venue in company folklore for these trips and were free to go where we wanted and when we wanted outside of project time. You know, like real grown-ups.
• I avoided Macho Man the entire trip except to give my presentation, working instead with my counterpart from Germany and socializing instead with his hallway neighbors from different countries and with the gregarious (and now distinguished) representative from England. Macho Man’s goslings didn’t seem to understand, which told me that Macho Man’s fictional narrative had many parts tailored to many different parties. This is not just typical of puppetmaster psychopaths, it defines how they operate in the psychoanalytical literature.
• Come time to give the presentation, I arrived independently at the meeting room and gave my presentation at the appointed time.
• Macho Man had arranged to split my presentation and have his bootlicker back at the home office wedge his vacuous hand-waving session between my two parts remotely in the wee hours of his day. No one seemed to notice how absurd this was. The reason such antics work is that in order to point them out, you pretty much have to point at the clown and tell everyone that he’s a clown. No one in polite society dares to do this and so like all psychopaths, Macho Man was protected by the very absurdity of his antics. As long as he keeps up the supremely confident macho man act (AKA con job), there’s nothing anyone can nor dare to do about it.

06.2 THE DIE IS CAST

Once back home after submitting my trip reports, the time was overripe for me to bow out of the project. They created a job for me in the local plant working with almost all new people. There was the obvious sense of relief but with a lifetime of experience dealing with psychopaths behind me, I knew deep down that this was just the beginning of the end. Macho Man would find a way to bring me down, hide me away, isolate me and pound me into oblivion. All he had to do was network into my new management structure and spread his false narrative into the new body politic with whatever revisions and updates would further his objective. While continuing to act the caretaker, he had to plant the seeds of his prescribed fate and strike enough fear into the hearts of the key players to motivate them to set and spring a trap to avoid his simmering wrath. On one occasion, chosen with precision when no one could hear, he accosted me in the hallway and asked mockingly if they had plans to move me into the nether reaches of the factory (as they had my predecessor), out of the way of his captive body politic. The new job would last a few months at most and then one day some little twist of prefabricated fate would change everything. I dove into the new role with relish but in the back of my mind, I already knew that I would respond to that inevitable twist of fate at the end of that inexorable hunt by vanishing without a trace. See GHOSTING above. That’s what I did from his project on the day he announced my replacement, and it’s what I would do from the company on the day the trap was sprung. I was absent from that meeting because I had already quit cold, without a word, which was a language I knew that only a psychopath would understand. I had learned from past experience that if you overstay your welcome by the psychopath, he and his minions will lose no time in clouding the circumstances of your departure to mask their plot. You have to leave immediately so as to leave them holding the murder weapon — to prevent them from generating distractions from their final few minutes’s work. You must leave NOTHING BUT THAT for the post-partem investigation to uncover, because it will be packed with equivocating middle managers uninterested in social justice but leaving no stone unturned for a way out of the mess. It must be shock therapy — the only thing dictatorial organizations respond to — delivered surgically, forever isolated from manufactured distractions.

06.3 THE MOTHERLY APOLOGIST

Where there’s a villain, there is always a motherly apologist.

I haven’t yet decided for my own account whether the motherly apologist is born or made, having noted only that wherever there’s a psychopath or narcopath, there’s a motherly apologist somewhere in the mix, watching over the monster, nurturing his or her growth as a consumer of souls, making excuses for his or her brazen predatory behavior patterns and normalizing everything he or she says and does. Once you’ve stumbled upon a motherly apologist, the social predator won’t be far away.

My working hypothesis is that the motherly apologist is a special type of acolyte as defined in Granfalloons and Cognotypes. The best way to introduce this denizen is to cite well-known examples from history (UNDER DEVELOPMENT).

• Errol Morris, born 5 February 1948, is a documentary filmmaker “known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and [for] the invention of the Interrotron”. I won’t dispute his achievements, but I will refer you to his “debunking” of the Umbrella Man theory that’s been a part of the narrative surrounding the JFK assassination since the release of the Zapruder Film in 1975, 12 years after the assassination took place on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963. Anyone familiar with Aristotle’s fallacies of argument can easily spot the break in Morris’ analysis, yet the corporate media have assimilated it into the overall narrative as though it peremptorily disproved any and all theories of the assassination that differ from the official conclusions of the Warren Commission. The two things to note in this clip are (1) Morris’ gushing, motherly dismissal of the Umbrella Man theory, cradling it like a sick baby before even wading into the substance of the theory; (2) his sudden break from reality in branching off from the simple presence of someone who was likely to have been acting as a signalman for the snipers to let them know, when JFK’s motorcade passed in front of him, whether or not the President had yet been hit and killed — without so much as even mentioning this simplest and most obvious theory — branching off instead into the most ludicrous alternative Umbrella Man theories that were likely spun off as disinformation to confuse the matter. Neither did Morris make any effort to question the identity of the man who “came forward” in 1978 to testify before Congress and explain away “his” presence on Dealey Plaza and the perfectly normal, everyday use of his umbrella as a “visual protest” of JFK’s father’s appeasement policies as Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1938 and 1939. — WHAT? Anyone of sound mind with no prior knowledge of the JFK assassination would come away from this brazen distortion of reality knowing full well that there was something to hide and that this strange creature was hell bent on doing his part to hide it. In this recording, Errol Morris embodies the quintessence of the motherly apologist for all people and for all time.

06.4 THE LYING IN WAIT STYLE

On the day the trap was sprung, I discovered a new style of psychopathy to add to the Macho and Puppetmaster styles we’ve already encountered in this post. Perhaps it’s already been covered in the medical literature. Until I find a preexisting mention, I’ll call it what best describes it to me: the Lying in Wait style. I compared it at the time to the way a deep-sea anglerfish hunts in the darkness of the abyssal plain. Unlike with the anglerfish, however, there’s no glowing lure protruding above the benthic silt. This predator just lurks in the background over days, weeks, months and years, searching and probing with infinite patience for something to add to a fictional narrative, or for something to seize and pounce on in the moment. As with the anglerfish, this human predator makes no contact with its prey until the moment of opportunity presents itself. Even then, the contact is peripheral, gloating and indirect. When the trap is sprung in the fleeting few minutes and seconds after years of probing, the predator speaks not to his victim but to the weak node in middle management he has long since chosen as the subject of his psychopathic bond. This his how corporate psychopaths exploit a dictatorial hierarchy and how the deeply flawed corporate business structure breeds them. Long before, the Lurking Predator, as we may call this one, will have invisibly swung the line on the management diagram that connects his chosen weak node to its manager over to himself. By the time the trap is sprung, the Weak Node in practice is reporting to the Lurking Predator first and foremost. The frayed bitter end of the Weak Node’s link to his manager has long since been waving freely in the deep ocean current to no one’s notice.

I so name Weak Node based on past experience suggesting his capitulation in advance to figures he seems to regard as political threats — threats with whom he had no intention, neither then nor in the future, of contesting or contradicting in any way. One the one hand, I had heard him describe the Lurking Predator to the attendees of his weekly status meeting, in the absence of Lurking Predator, as someone of special status within the group. To me, this sort of appellation had long since become a “tell” that Lurking Predator had captured Weak Node politically and was holding him entranced in what psychopathologists call the psychopathic bond. On the other hand, Weak Node had resolved a matter of consistency within the software I was revamping in favor of petty politics. All the remaining time I was there, I had to tag as “special accommodation for xyz” every situation in which I had to break the symmetry of the directory paths, or the nomenclature of the constants that defined them, just so that abc in xyz group would not have to change her daily habits by putting things in this rather than that directory — a habit that should have taken her no more than an hour or so to adapt to. Thus Weak Node had chosen years and potentially decades of confusing software to avoid a moment of inconvenience for one person whose longevity on the project had cast her as a pillar of political support in the mind of Weak Node.

You will notice in the following animation that Weak Node and Laboring Grunt (myself) both reported separately to Legitimate Manager, which should have made Legitimate Manager an arbiter to whom I could bring this operational situation gone suddenly wrong that I’m about to describe. Although I did not therefore officially report to Weak Node, I was assigned to his project area which, after cutting ties with Macho Man as chronicled above, left Weak Node holding my last thread of political and financial support at the company. Having already described to Legitimate Manager in my official performance review document the antics of Macho Man chronicled above to no response, I saw no point in attempting the same extemporaneously with regard to the machinations of Lurking Predator and Weak Node as I am about to do here in an orderly fashion. I stopped short of calling Macho Man a psychopath for legal reasons and because it would only have reduced my report to the status of uncreditable sensationalism in the minds of its recipients without adding anything readily understandable to them. My upline having had no training whatsoever in psychopathic behaviors and no in-house experts to consult, there seemed little point in attaching the label. So instead, I simply detailed the antics of Macho Man, in the hour or two I was given to finish my review submission, on the hope — slim to none — that one or more of these behaviors would be recognized as those of a psychopath. As already noted, I got no response to that submission, even though it should have merited some sort of conclusory discussion. Having long been exhausted from overwork when this new cudgel hit, I lacked even a small fraction of the energy it would take to step back, assess and report in real time on the intrigues and intricacies of this new situation given the lack of response to my performance report, let alone venture to hope that anything productive could possibly come of such flailing.

In Fishhead Movie, Babiak & Hare illustrate this sort of dynamic visually with the chainsaw-wielding psychopath buzzing his way up to the pinnacle of the pyramidal corporate hierarchy. In this way, the psychopaths bubble up to command positions, and the corporation begins thenceforth to comport itself collectively like a psychopath.

06.5 THE TRAP IS SPRUNG

It started out as a very good day. I had just put out of my mind everything I had long known about psychopaths and the recent events that had already sealed my fate in light of that understanding. I was chatting it up with those around me and starting to think to myself that this was the ideal job at the ideal company at which I could gainfully conclude my engineering career. This would not be the first time such giddy heights of fancy would be cast into the darkest depths of reality on the same day but it was probably the last. No, I would learn fully and finally that day, as I should have learned many times before, there are no Hollywood endings for the perennial target of roving psychopaths hungry for prey on whose backs they can stay afloat, stepping deftly along on one after another throughout their predatory careers, despite a paucity of useful talents — useful, that is, to anyone but themselves.

The machine was in full operation that day but progress had been stalled by the sort of technical issues that always come up. My instructions for installing the minor fix I had prepared were a bit ambiguous. Yes, install it today but no, not while operations were in progress. I brought the installation to the brink of the few keystrokes it would take to perform the installation by way of the code I had improved over and over again, along with the vast swaths of other software that now kept operations running smoothly. Like many of the improvements I had made over these months and years, this minor fix would lift a huge burden of complication from the daily work of the operators. It would make their variable name entry operations case-insensitive, so that these operations would be more like the progressively routine job of remembering easily-recallable variable names and less like memorizing complex passwords. There were hundreds of them, and they were already expressing relief at the prospect of not having to torture their minds this way after today.

At some point during a long pause in operations pending mechanical or electrical adjustments, knowing that it might cause a glitch, but by virtue of the layering of safety interlocks in both software and hardware, that no such activity had, at any point in the operational history of the machine, produced the slightest hazard to people or equipment, an inexplicable wave of abandon washed over me on this lazy day and I decided to get this fix over with. I had long since been given full responsibility over the software during operations, so I thought what the heck and put in the final keystrokes. That barely audible “thud” of safety interlocks were heard as the dynamically-linked libraries I was updating were disconnected from their client processes by the update. The software went down, as it had the same way on at least one similar occasion in the past during a months-long cease in operations. We should have done something then to prevent that from happening. My command should have returned an error. But we never found time to do that, and so the command went through when it shouldn’t have. It should have been an easy software interlock to put in but we left the hazard exposed, relying instead on the “just have to remember that” rule that governs routine operations in the notoriously signless Grand Central Station in New York. The clerks get the same questions hundreds of times a day but no one higher up seems to care in the “just gotta know that” culture for which New York City is famous.

Everyone there present who was not occupied with other things, the latter whose notice it escaped entirely, knew that it posed no hazard, that all that was needed was to restart the software and let the updated dynamically-linked libraries reconnect to their client processes, after which the operators would be able to continue issuing their own commands. But that’s not the logic that was followed.

The logic that was followed was driven by the Lurking Predator in the animation above, and by the secret fictional narrative he’d been feeding to the Weak Node for years, now mixed in, no doubt, with that of the Macho Man predator from whose clutches I thought I’d long since slipped away, and by the mounting political fear this built up within the Weak Node, who was also pressured by formal incentives to minimize down time that he had previously insisted to me could be kept to zero. I told him then that it was impossible to run an error-free operation but he doubled down and pressed on. In retrospect, they should have counter-incentivized him in the direction of employee retention but there’s no accounting for a lack of moral courage when the need for it suddenly arises. You freeze, you panic and you follow all the wrong steps to try to undo what can’t be undone.

It didn’t help that I’d recently been tasked with documenting the Lurking Predator’s routine procedures, which he had heretofore kept as a closely guarded secret. During this process, he insisted to me that he didn’t have any procedures but just acted on instinct in everything he did. The cold hard fact, of course, is that nothing gets done without procedures, written or unwritten, and insisting there aren’t any reveals petty paranoia. Management wanted them written, a task which would soon expose his mystical unwritten procedures to be quite commonplace and easily obtained online, which is where I went to finish them when he stopped providing me information. I know he took this as a threat because when given part of the documentation job to do on his own, he dragged it out, made less and less progress and eventually just refused to continue.

Back in the present moment, I tried to tell the operators what had happened but the Weak Node had already been spun up by the Lurking Predator and flat out interrupted me as he launched into an independent inquiry. After speaking with the operators and fishing around in the log files with the Lurking Predator, he came back to me and asked me about the very thing I had tried to resolve with the operators before he had interrupted me and taken over the analysis. The upshot before we concluded for the day was in the forced and affected spirit of a lesson learned, but the compromising expressions on the faces of the operators told a different story.

06.6 TUNNELING, SCENARIO 2

I also remember the face of the Lurking Predator as he slid past me and mumbled about how dynamically linked libraries worked, which we had all learned in college — the undisprovable implication being, of course, that I did not know this. I remember the fathomless eyes that never looked at much of anything but seemed to constantly twich with the rapid-eye movement symptomatic of some undiagnosed mental condition. I had learned years before while researching a US patent (5302130) and two related monograms on astronautics that these eye movements are called “saccades”. They’re common in daily activites such as reading but should have given over to “smooth pursuit” while walking or moving about. It’s the fist time I think I ever saw those eyes, so he must have been in the habit of choosing his conversations strategically and of hiding his eyes from everyone else.

One of the operators on duty that day had tried to impress upon me in the weeks after I joined the company that there was something profoundly wrong with this person. Not knowing about psychopathy and the associated nomenclature, the only adjective he could come up with for this Lurking Predator was “dipshit”. While he had bones to pick about this or that design choice or about policy, as far as I can recall, this operator never said anything dorogatory about anyone else. I should have known right then and there what to expect from this “dipshit” based on my past experience and on this operator’s summary judgment but I chose instead to give him the benefit of the doubt. In all my time at the company, however, I can’t remember any occasion on which the Lurking Predator would even so much as speak to me unless I had asked a question. Having introduced my wife to both he and his Weak Node at a luncheon, he just looked away. Important? A trivial detail? His subsequent actions, meticulously planned and spectacularly executed, would later militate with those of other psychopaths to rend asunder and utterly destroy that marriage. You decide. At no time until this final event had I ever even seen those strange, twitching eyes that made it look like there was a short circuit somewhere behind them.

I stayed late that day so that I could install my software fix properly after everyone had left, to unburden the operators of their daily eyestrain and collateral memory cognition exams. The email that arrived from the Weak Node that evening instructed me to cease any and all activities on our systems without express permission. I don’t think the Lurking Predator had intended him to, but yes, he copied the Lurking Predator, thus exposing him for the record as the mastermind of the takedown. It’s possible he had planned the nightmare move of co-locating me with the Lurking Predator in the back rooms of the physical plant in accordance with Macho Man’s express wishes but I’ll probably never know that for certain. What I do know for certain is that had I not quit, everything would have played into the hands of Macho Man and the Lurking Predator. Their secret fictional narrative had had three years to take root and spread, and there would be no digging my way out of it.

I came in to my office during the quiet hours of the next morning to get my things, waved at one of my hallmates down the hall, left my badge on the desk, walked out to the parking lot and drove off the campus for the last time. Keep in mind that based on past experience, I had had reason to believe this day would come even before I sat for the job interview, so there was literally nothing in my office to clean up. It wasn’t just Spartan habits, it was knowing full well how it would end and planning accordingly.

In retrospect, the attack was triggered by the sudden opportunity this turn of events presented for the Lurking Predator to swoop in for the kill using his long-groomed Weak Node as the veneer of legitimacy he needed to make the attack work. Rather than ask anything of me or make further inquiries of any kind that might admit my side of what happened into consideration, he instead pressed the Weak Node to tunnel past all of that to his undisprovable presupposition (see TUNNELING under prior headings), upon which the Weak Node was to base a punishment after skipping over any and all semblance of due inquiry and due process.

I’ve been as honest in owning up to my mistake as I have been in explaining why it provoked an overreaction that backed me into a corner from which there was no escape and that permanently damaged my political prospects at this, the last corporation I would likely ever work for. Thirty-four years of past experience and three years of learning, creating, completing everything I started and refining my skills had been needlessly yet irreversibly rendered null and void in a moment’s indiscretion that should hardly have raised an eyebrow but for the indidious, years-long scheming of a Lurking Predator and for his quick and flawless exploitation of the first and ultimately the last five-minute window of opportunity he would ever have to bring it to full and final closure.

Going back over all of the similar episodes in past employment, I realized then and there that I had chosen in my twenties, pursued and excelled in the absolute worst civilian career path imaginable. The freely-exploitable hierarchy and the work products that no one can see leave honest contributors surrounded by endlessly scheming, opportunistic and fact-free predators and professional credit takers, treated like children all the way to retirement, pushed aside at the earliest opportunity once their best work is done and consigned to the human junk heap in what should have been their golden years. Your wealth of accumulated experience counts for nothing. Thanks for all the software but you’re old, therefore you suck. Bye bye Boomer.

06.7 THE LADY IN WAITING

I encountered three psychopaths in total at this company but you may have noticed that so far we have covered only two: the Macho Man and the Lurking Predator. So that’s three psychopaths, two of them already covered, and a fully-integrated narcopath to be covered later. Here’s the rundown on psychopath number three, which we can call the Lady in Waiting. I’m using that name not to suggest that she was born to serve anyone but herself, but to note that in my situation, she manifested how psychopaths, when they recognize one another’s presence, tend to give way to one another, fall into line and take turns destroying this or that victim. They do this, you know it’s really quite obvious, to prevent the fictional narratives they’ve built up over time to contradict and collide with one another around a single victim. They’re very good at damage control when that happens but it’s less risky to just prevent it from happening. So they take turns and attack in sequence, each attack normalizing the attacker as supreme within the organization and the victim as fair game.

In a brief side glance on my way out the door, I once caught the Lady in Waiting blasting an Elizabeth Holmes style psychopathic stare down onto the receptionist at the entrance to the plant housing what I’ve been calling “the machine”. I had never seen her do this before nor since but with Elizabeth Holmes and her famous stare already in yesterday’s news, I took note of it as corroboration of what I already suspected. This case illustrated the machine like, ice-cold and algorithmic behavior patterns that all psychopaths follow regardless of the risks or potential benefits. In her case I counted three driving incentives over time, which really just revisit behaviors already covered in abstract but from new angles on their style of delivery: (1) attention; (2) social advancement by contrast to a straw man; (3) distraction from her frequent covert escapes, on lucrative paid contract hours, to the surrounding beaches and hiking trails. It was narrative inversion in my case as she projected her own truancy onto me, not knowing in the end that I had already left the company and was out enjoying the air and the sun for a change in my newfound liberty. My wife and I passed her on a local beach one day some time before then but I pretended not to recognize her, having figured out early that she was a psychopath and that any interaction would inure to my detriment.

You could close your eyes in the control room and know which one was the psychopath. As I’ve often noticed in restaurants, there’s usually one table at which someone is speaking loudly and constantly, never giving up the floor for more than a few seconds and basically delivering a never-ending monologue to everyone else at the table. While most people in the control room exercised common courtesy and several were openly gregarious, the Lady in Waiting would always avert her eyes and pointedly ignore me. Any greeting on my part would be met with silence, and she would gesture as though I’d broken her concentration. She would proceed as though she were clearing her mind for the task at hand and shut me out completely. That’s when I knew she had chosen me as her next victim, but I suspect she knew as well as I did that others were already in line before her. So that’s what she did. She fell into line and waited. Meanwhile she went off and had a baby, then came back and picked right up where she had left off, as though nothing had happened. Motherhood doesn’t change everyone, and she would have been getting impatient to find someone new to pounce on. Her unwavering attitude told me that I was still her target.

On the day the Lurking Predator and his Weak Node struck, the Lady in Waiting was right there in the mix, her wait almost over, and seemed to have been caught up in a gentle whirlwind of rising expectations, as though the trinity of predators were gathering to pool their energy. Something was in the air but no one knew exactly what it might be.

About a week after my sudden and by this time notorious disappearance from the workplace, the Lady in Waiting found me and my wife 20 miles away at a National Park. It was a bullseye rendezvous that would have been easy to dismiss as random absent my past experience with these creatures. As though expecting to encounter me there and hoping for some kind of trouble, she had brought with her a 4-man retinue of what I could only describe as personal bodyguards. I had shared a selfie of an earlier visit to this park with Legitimate Manager a day or two after leaving the office for the last time but hardly expected it would spread without someone finding out about it through the grapevine and actively inquiring as to the exact location. Based on my past experience with these creatures, the next step would be for her to report back this “sighting” — as though I were Elvis — to create and ramp up the “scandal” back at the office. Due for lack of any other explanation to my inexplicable appeal as a choice target for psychopaths over decades, this creepy “magic meeting” was not new to me. I’d encountered it several times before, which isn’t much over 40 years but just enough to start giving credence to the pattern. You exit an organization under unorthodox circumstances and within a week or two, a psychopath or sycophant from said organization tracks you down using either a 6th sense or a highly opportunistic and distinguished talent for intelligence gathering and target interception.

I’ve said it before and it bears repeating here: The twofold danger in dealing with psychopaths is that of overestimating the nobility of their objectives and of underestimating their talent for achieving them.

What had happened here was that this Lady in Waiting, as I’ve been calling her, long since determined to ride high on a piece of the attention I had drawn, which she would parlay into a scandal after her long wait for a turn at me, was just as determined not to miss out on it before it died out in the wake of my sudden disappearance. That’s it. She reacted opportunistically, without delay, in her pursuit of a very low objective, and expertly achieved it. This is anything but normal behavior, which is why it can be found in the psychopathology literature.

While this last episode may seem trite, it encapsulates in a nutshell the perverse objectives of a typical psychopath. While the objectives and means of obtaining them are highly evolved and change little, the context and collateral damage get worse when we explore other scenarios — far worse. In manifesting a defining characteristic of psychopathy called semantic aphasia, psychopaths show total disregard for the consequences of their actions, and for the brutality and scale of those consequences, in pursuing these yet undisputably trite objectives.

My tenure at the companies forming the backdrop of these accounts spanned about 11 years but there are so many other horror stories that revisit me in memory and which I will document here between healthy breaks for therapeutic research and reporting on more engaging subjects such as the science, ancient history and forensic philology harbored at GoYrOwnWay.com. By the nature of psychopathic victimhood, these slow-moving, excruciating and traumatizing experiences all took place all but invisibly in fully normalized institutional torture chambers that look very different from the outside than they do from the inside. Some of them are holes in the wall while others are world famous.

In future episodes of this neverending story, I will also detail at least two more recent and perhaps overlapping scenarios, still unfolding, that probably shouldn’t be documented prematurely, in advance of any legal action in my ongoing quest for intercession and remediation. In particular, I have two more psychopaths in mind, who have met in the past and may still be communicating with one another, over wide geographic distances, not so much to help each other as to selfishly gain, each for their own purposes, useful intelligence in their otherwise separate efforts to, well, at this point, knowing that I’m onto them and in hot pursuit, bury me forever.