Personality Disorders And Choice

According to some in psychology, evil in humanity stems from narcissistic and sociopathic personality disorders.

This is just as wrong as Buddhists claiming that suffering is based in desire or New Agers claiming that negative thinking is at the root of what is wrong with the world.

Certainly a person who cares only about himself can do wrong, sometimes massive wrong. But so can a man who cares about his country, or about his community, or about his religious sect, enough to go to war against others. Even people who care about humanity as such can go wrong, as when they create things such as Communism. To see narcissism or sociopathy as the root of all evil is ridiculous.

What concerns me is when I asked a counselor how they deal with sociopaths, she said, “lock them up.” Now I take the Constitution seriously, and nowhere in the Constitution does it say that you can lock people up for their psychological makeup. If the claim is that these people are evil and can only be evil whatever they do, that claim is irrational, it is cruel and it is wrong. Anyone capable of choice is capable of rightful choice. That includes sociopaths. And I say this as somebody whose score on the sociopath dimension was quite low.

Instead what we have seen is a hysteria. It has been a persecution of people for how they think. This smacks of Orwell and his concept of crimethink. It is criminal to think in certain ways. And a person who thinks in those ways is rendered a criminal and persecuted even if he has not committed a crime.

Now I have absolutely no personal reasons to speak in defense of sociopaths. I do however have very valid reasons to confront hysterical and oppressive thinking and to stand in defense of people's rights. Once again, what we are dealing with here is cruel and irrational. Anything capable of choice is capable of rightful choice. Claiming anything to the contrary is wrong absolutely.

At core of this is this question, Are people responsible for their character? If they are, then even if they've adapted as sociopaths during childhood they can choose to improve their character in adulthood. And if, as many in psychology say, they cannot do that and can only be bad, then people are not responsible for their character. In either case what the psychologists are doing is wrong. They are damning people. They are blaming them for their problems while denying them the ability to fix their problems. And that is a completely irrational and cruel stance to take.

If the claim is that one should confront things such as cruelty and destructiveness, that claim is correct. However to damn people and to deny them the capacity for rightful conduct or thought is wrong absolutely. No, narcissism and sociopathy are not the only possible sources of evil. There are many possible sources of evil. As for the people who have these disorders, they are still people. And that means that they are capable of righful choice.

Adano's Disciples And Christ's Disciples

From 1995 to 1999, I was with a woman named Layo, who prior to being with me had been married to the right-hand man of a Hindu swami named Adano Christopher Ley. She described to me the nastiness that she endured from his disciples.

Basically, these people were confused. They mistook reflected greatness for actual greatness. They had had the good fortune of knowing a great man. However they themselves were nowhere close to being great. Most of them were jerks. Layo has much more the right to claim greatness than do these people, as she used what she learned from Adano to come up with brilliant insight on many subjects, some of which have been formative to my own thought.

Christ's disciples did not behave that way. Christ's disciples knew that their wisdom and character came from Christ, and they did not act like bullies. Christ's disciples accomplished quite a lot. Whereas with the possible exception of Layo's ex-husband Ed “Atom” Bergstrom, who compiled some of Adano's teachings into a website (https://www.adanoley.com/), Adano's disciples have not accomplished much of anything.

The mistake that Adano's disciples made, that Christ's disciples did not, was that of mistaking reflected greatness for actual greatness. I do not know why Adano did not correct them in that. When Christ's disciples started making that error and were arguing which one of them was the greatest, Jesus came and washed their feet. He taught them humility by doing that. If your teacher is willing to do such a thing for you, then you are obligated to be humble yourself.

More important than humility though is treating other people rightfully. Christ commanded people to do that. Adano's disciples were not willing to do that, at least toward Layo. In cases of both Adano and Christ we see very wise and powerful people; but Christ's disciples became better people than Adano's disciples, and they accomplished a lot more.

Was Adano a false prophet or an anti-christ? His powers and his knowledge were real enough. However, judging by the fruit, the work that he did was inferior to that of Jesus. He did not teach his disciples the right attitude. They became arrogant and mean. And that was an oversight that has had very negative effects on the legacy of this great man.

Confronting Anti-Jewish Slanders

In my writing on the Internet, I've been encountering a lot of anti-Jewish propaganda. I am going now to address some of the claims that I have heard.

One has been that Jews are in control. There is an obvious response to that claim. If Jews were in control – and if Jews were evil – then people saying such things would be facing a firing squad. That they are instead free to spread their nonsense shows either that Jews are not in control, or that the Jews are so good that they would even let live the people who want them dead.

Another is the claim that Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by Jewish media. I have a perfect refutation to that claim. I come from the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, the media were not Jewish. Yet they carried extensive descriptions of the Holocaust, as well as of the Nazi invasion into the Soviet Union that cost 20 million Soviet lives, the bulk of them not Jewish.

Then there is the claim that Jews want to destroy the family unit or want to destroy Christianity. To people who believe such things: I am your worst nightmare. I am a Jewish man who has converted to Christianity and who is a dedicated family man. In fact some of the strongest and most effective families I have known were Jewish. It is ridiculous to claim that these people are against family unit when they are themselves fiercely dedicated to their families.

Finally we see claims such as that Jews want to destroy the white race. Completely ridiculous. I know no Jewish people who have an agenda against the white race. I know Jewish people who have a low view of black, or Muslim, or Mexican people. I know none who have a negative view of the white people. In my family the English and the Americans are held in high esteem. The people who are held in low esteem are the same people whom the skinhead types like to attack – the ethnics who refuse to work or to follow the law.

To the Jewish people, being faced with this nonsense, my advice is as follows. Arm yourselves with guns; more importantly arm yourselves with arguments such as the above. We know where this kind of agitation leads, and I refuse to stand by to let the world go there. I hope that more Jewish people have learned their lessons from history and are going to do what they can to defend themselves and Jewish people worldwide.

Confronting Reverse Snobbery

Much has been written about undesirable effects of snobbery; but I have seen – both in America and in Australia – reverse snobbery. In these situations, people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are abusive to people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and nobody does anything about it.

I have known a woman in Australia who was descended from Irish royalty. She was together for several years with a country boy. She worked hard; he worked barely a day in his life. Yet he kept running her down, making case after case that she was trash, and beating her up. Many people thought that he was the good guy when he was being an absolute bully and a leech.

I have known a woman in America who was descended from English royalty. She was married for 15 years to a man who came from the rough side of town. He worked and made sizable amounts of money as an accountant; but he was an absolute tyrant. He would make her spend six hours a day cleaning the house and would come at her with fists in case that he found a speck of dust on the floor. Like many in his line of work he knew how to put on a front, so once again people thought that he was the good guy.

Apparently these people do not have a clear view of history. It was higher-born intellectuals such as Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin that created American democratic system; and without them an average American would be living in a European monarchy, tilling a two-acre plot of land, dying at age 30 and having his sons drafted into the military and daughers into domestic servitude. For people in places such as America or Australia to have an anti-intellectual attitude, or the reverse snobbery attitude, is to forget what made their arrangement possible in the first place. Both places owe vastly to intellectuals and to people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. And for these people to treat such people like dirt is completely wrong.

Are there good people in lower socioeconomic backgrounds? Of course there are. Are there bad ones in higher ones? Certainly. But reverse snobbery is as damnable as regular snobbery. To abuse a woman because she comes from a higher background than yourself is wrong absolutely. That is especially the case – as in the first example – when the woman is working harder than do you.

In these situations, the women from higher backgrounds were being treated like cattle by people who had none of their virtues. They were both talented artists; they were both beautiful; they were both compassionate and kind. Their partners were none of these things. If women such as that get treated this way in our society, then something is badly wrong with our society. And it merits the attention of people who care about such things as where the world goes to see these dynamics and counteract them.

For my part, I have seen it from both sides. I went to a private school on a full scholarship while being a son of poor immigrants, and some students were nasty to me for that reason. However I have also been with a woman from the rough side of town who kept snarling at me for having some upper-class sensibilities that I got from – guess where. So I do not see a reason at all to see either side as better or worse than the other. Nixon was as wrong to militate against the high-born as Hitler was against the Jews. Neither had chosen to be what they were. However to attack the higher-born than yourselves and treat them like dirt is damnable as well. That is especially the case, once again, in places such as America, that owe their statehood and their system to upper-class intellectuals.

So I put this forth to people's attention. Many notice snobbery; not enough notice reverse snobbery. And I believe that I owe it to the women in question as well as any number of others to confront reverse snobbery and prevent these kinds of problems from taking place.

Spirituality And Reality

There are many people who see spiritual beliefs as a function of failure to deal with reality. This is wrong – this is completely wrong.

The reason is that there is a lot more to reality than what these people acknowledge. I for one have had many experiences with less than a billionth chance of happening whose only possible explanations are spiritual and religious. The number of these experiences is such that I would have to be a complete psycho to deny them. I do not have the luxury of such beliefs.

Some things can be measured. Others cannot be measured, at least using present technology. They are felt. They are intuited. They are real even though they are not measurable with our present machines.

Sometimes they actually can be measured. I used to see master numbers on the clock – numbers such as 2:22 and 3:33 – so one day I decided to set up an experiment. I set four different clocks to four different times around the house and recorded every time that I looked at the clock. One in ten of the numbers I got were master numbers, when by chance it would be one in sixty.

One day I saw in a meditation an outpouring of sorrow in Argentina. Shortly after that I picked up a paper and found out that there was an outpouring of sorrow in Argentina because someone famous had died.

My girlfriend woke up in the middle of the night, complaining that her ex-husband was speaking to her in spirit. In the morning she decided to test it, so she said in her head, “OK Todd, if you have been speaking to me in spirit call me.” Less than a minute later Todd called her and told her that he had been talking to her in spirit.

In 1995, I had a beautiful relationship with a woman named Michelle, who had finished Harvard in three years and who was a poet. In 2000 I wanted to have it recapitulated, so what happens but that I start corresponding with a woman named Michele, who had finished Caltech in three years, who was a poet, and who in 1995 had had a similarly beautiful relationship with a man from Bulgaria whose last name was similar to my middle name.

In all of these cases we see results that are vastly outside of chance, and whose only explanations are spiritual and religious.

When I started talking about these experiences, most of what I got was crap. Supposedly I was stupid; supposedly I was illogical; supposedly I was a kook. I am none of these things. I am somebody who has had many spiritual experiences, and who, unlike any number of those involved in skepticism, is too honest to deny them.

Logic is a method, not a worldview. When something happens that contradicts the worldview, the logical thing to do is to correct the worldview and not to deny the experience. The other path is not logical; it is dishonest.

Just how dishonest? I once knew a young mathematics teacher who said that he ignored all claims of the supernatural. This is not logic, it is dishonesty. In fact there are many genuine scientists who speak openly about their spiritual experiences, and I am acquainted with a distinguished anthropology professor who speaks of such things quite a lot. He can do logic at least as well as any skeptic. He also knows that there is more to reality than what these people believe.

Another false belief about spiritual experiences is that they are all positive. That is wrong as well. Spiritual experiences can be scary. At the very least they are going to be disruptive to a worldview that denies them. That is not the fault of spiritual experience. That is the fault of the worldview.

Do we throw away science? Not at all. However we have the obligation to make sense of such things, whether or not they are what we want or what accords with what we know of the world. As Augustine said, “Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” The main implication of such things is that we cannot be simply evolving matter. It strongly points to an intelligent creator; and that means everything for how we live our lives.

A Christian scientist was talking in the church about the “survival-of-the-fittest” theory. He said that the fittest being in the world was Jesus, and Jesus sacrificed Himself for the rest of us. He did not order us to live by Darwinian dynamics. He ordered us to live how God wants us to live.

How could Christianity have outlasted the Roman Empire if it was stupid? How could it have become formative to the greatest civilization in the history of the world? Paul was nowhere close to being stupid. He was brilliant. And people have much to learn from what he said and did.

One thing is for sure. Spirituality is not for fools, lunatics or conmen. It has adherents with vastly greater intellect than its critics, most of whom are also better human beings. Any attempt to pathologize such a thing is supreme arrogance of thinking that your worldview is better than reality. Once again, there is vastly more to reality than these people believe there to be. And the logical thing to do, when faced with this, is to correct the worldview.

I have shared some of my experiences. I have a testimony of many others, including people of exceptional intelligence and character. And they have a much greater understanding of reality than the engineering types who think that they are the only sane and rational people in the world.

To simply condemn something that the bulk of humanity believes in is a far greater hubris than anything that such people ascribe to the spiritually minded. And it is a highly destructive form of hubris that beats people down and prevents valuable things from being done. So it is time that more people call these bullies on their behavior. Do not discard science; discard materialistic bigotry. And allow people the benefits of both mind and spirit, resulting in them leading much better lives.

Psychologists: Improve People's Character, Not Self-Esteem

There are some in psychology who see low self-esteem as the root cause of all social and personal problems and believe that such things can be eliminated by raising people's self-esteem.

This is ridiculous.

There can be any number of reasons for wrongful conduct. It can be due to ignorance, to bad values, to wrong beliefs. It can be wrong done intentionally and it can be wrong done unintentionally. To claim that the universal reason for such things is low self-esteem is just as wrong as the Buddhists claiming that all suffering comes from desire, or New Agers claiming that positive thinking will solve everything wrong with the world.

These people think that solution starts with high self-esteem. That is not the starting point; that is the end point. What you need to do instead is work on your character. Then there is more about yourself to esteem.

If that is not done, self-esteem becomes a goose chase. There will always be someone to tear you down, and keeping getting up will after a while get completely tedious. It becomes a Sysiphean labor. The reason is that nothing real changes. All that happens is that you feel differently about yourself. And that means that your house is built on sand.

Instead it makes much more sense to build the house on a rock. Create solid character. As for psychology, it needs to make much more headway into figuring out just how character can be built. I have some ideas on the subject, and I have experiential reasons for saying that this is in fact possible. I want to see psychology discard its self-esteem errors and figure out instead how to help people build character. And then the changes that do take place will be real and lasting and will actually make you a better person, resulting in there being more reason for you to esteem yourself well.

Feminism And Western Civilization

A former friend of mine wrote in late 1990s that women had become "hateful, arrogant dykes."

I have an idea as to how that happened.

The form of feminism at the time taught that the Western civilization's cultural legacy was racist and patriarchal. They decided that anyone who took part in any aspect of it was an idiot, and that they, as the only people around them who did not, were the only people in the world who were not idiots. Their attitude was not a function of their character. It was a direct function of their beliefs. If you think that the whole world is composed of idiots and that only the people who believe what you believe are not idiots, then you are going to be hateful and arrogant as a function of these beliefs.

Their contempt was directed especially at women who were attractive and women who liked men. They thought that all these women were weak and stupid, and that they were the only smart and strong women in the world. I have seen similar conduct on the part of Nazis and skinheads, who think that they are the only real men in the world and that everyone else is a sissy or a racial inferior.

Wrong beliefs are refuted by reality. Right now, the biggest reality serving to refute these beliefs is the influx of women from Eastern Europe. These women are at least as smart and as strong as any American feminist, and they have better ideas on how to conduct themselves. So we see now in the White House a beautiful, strong-willed woman from Slovenia who can hold her own in any argument with any American feminist.

The more such women come to America, the more there is real-world refutation of wrongful things that have come from feminism.

Is everything that has been part of Western cultural legacy racist or patriarchial? The Western cultural legacy has included many women, and not stupid or weak ones either. I have translated two such influences - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetayeva. The West has had many great minds, and I have not seen feminists produce work comparable to that of the Western classics. Their influence has been less transformative and more destructive. They were effective at deconstructing various Western beliefs; but their own beliefs have not been an improvement on most of them.

So this stupidity has begotten another stupidity from the other side. It is the strident misogyny that has been going around, claiming that women are stupid and evil and that when they are given freedom they turn into Catherine McKinnon. That is completely wrong as well. There is nothing stupid or evil about my mother or my daughter, and I would punch in the face any man who says such things about them.

What are we seeing happening here? What we are seeing here is a massive intellectual error: Rejecting the legacy of an entire civilization because some influences in it have been pricks. What people who do such a thing perform is failing to avail themselves of useful knowledge. A civilization does not rise to the leadership of the world by being stupid. It rises to the leadership of the world by having valuable ideas; and these can be useful even to feminists themselves.

Of course the Western civilization has seen many different directions. The Western civilisation means everything from Thomas Hobbes to William Blake, and these two would have gotten into a fistfight. I have seen a Western Buddhist writing that the Western philosophy is contradictory. There is a very good reason for that. The Western philosophy owes to many influences that come from many different places. It is contradictory because it comes from contradictory sources. And there are things to be learned from many of these sources for just about anything that a person may seek to do.

So we have Shakespeare writing The Taming Of The Shrew, but we also have Shakespeare writing Othello. We have Nietzsche writing that women should raise great men instead of attempting to become great themselves, and we have John Stuart Mill writing brilliant and passionate work in support of women's rights. As for myself, I support women's rights, and I have been involved in a fight against domestic violence. But in no way do I support destructive, hateful, and arrogant influences such as what we have seen above.

There are differences between men and women, and there are differences among men and women. I was seen in my childhood as a girlie-boy, but women in my adult life have found me to be masculine. I have closely known women who were completely different from one another, as well as men who were completely different from one another. But my daughter has always been very feminine even though neither I nor her mother were instructing her in that direction. I once read a feminist woman talking about how her three-year-old son thought that he was a dinosaur and wanted to chew off her foot, and how she realised at that point that there are clearly natural differences between women and men.

Should all men be coerced in the same way, and all women in another? I do not believe that they should be. However neither is it correct to disown an entire cultural legacy or to have contempt for anyone who takes part in any aspect of it. The correct solution is to present great works, and it is also to produce great works. And that will result in the civilization growing and in people in it - both men and women - growing in knowledge and wisdom.

Self-Esteem And Character

Many in psychology see the solution to personal problems as working on self-esteem or loving yourself. An argument I've heard is that a person who esteems himself well will also esteem others well and be a good person. That is wrong. It works the other way around. You become a better person, there are more reasons for you to esteem yourself well and there are more reasons to love yourself.

The solution is not working on self-esteem but working on character. It is actually improving yourself. That being done, better self-esteem follows.

How do you work on yourself? One part is exercise, which builds discipline. Another is holding yourself to a high standard of conduct. It is to monitor your actions and your thoughts and getting rid of what is unworthy. And it is replacing it with rightful thought and rightful action.

Working on self-esteem is a goose chase. There will always be someone to tear down whatever self-esteem you build. But character is something that nobody can take away from you; and improvement in character is real, lasting improvement.

So I would recommend people to stay away from self-esteem psychology and instead to go to character building. The result will be an actual improvement rather than a perceived improvement. And the perceived improvement will follow.