He’s fucking psycho.
That is what my wife said after a disturbing incident we had with someone. Now, this particular individual might not be deserving of the phrase as a permanent designator, but in general, I am warming up to the term “psycho.” While it is a crude and informal pejorative, not meant to be as descriptive as medical terms like “antisocial personality disorder,” it carries an important message: get the fuck away from this person.
Psycho is shorthand for either “psychopath” and “psychotic,” and when a person has elements of both, the phrase is warranted. The former is related to their ethics: a psycho adopts “beyond good and evil” principles, permitting themselves to operate outside of society’s ethical standards, emboldening them to transgress the moral intuitions of others. The latter is related to their metaphysics: a psycho’s ontology is far removed from the consensus reality of others, fueled by all sorts of drugs, which blur the lines between spiritual revelations and psychotic breaks. God only knows what “discarnate entities” are attached to these individuals.
If the individual has high intelligence and a developmentally arrested personality structure, they will create sophisticated narratives to explain their lived experience. By granting themselves divine authority through spiritual narcissism, they ultimately justify immoral behavior. These individuals can not have real relationships, as they only feel secure in trauma-bonded dynamics, where they have the power, which orientates toward cult-like social fields.
The ability to pass as a charming individual and the reality that they may aim to accomplish good in the world complicates matters. In the book Saints and Psychopaths, William L. Hamilton argues that more psychos are posing as saints than there are genuine saints. He makes a few important distinctions:
Psychos have no morality; they only mimic morality. Ultimately, they are immoral, which they justify by whatever they perceive their divine mission might be. In contrast, saints possess a deep morality that may seem amoral to a society that has lost its virtue.
Psychos are “constantly planting the seeds of their own destruction.” They are agents of chaos, operating on numerous beliefs that may be internally coherent to them but are externally incoherent to everyone else, leading to disabling and dispiriting social fields.
Psychos crave attention: “One of the signs of a psychopath is that wherever they go, they tend to become the center of attention.” In contrast, saints go out of their way to avoid being the center of attention, secretly cohering social fields toward greater harmony.
Perhaps the most challenging thing about dealing with them, particularly those aimed toward good—whether as leaders of spiritual communities or agentic entrepreneurs, aka “psychopreneurs”—is the coherence of the argument that “this is just the way things are.” The argument goes something like this: we need to give certain people a pass because only flawed individuals can change a flawed world.
For those called to do good and who insist on being good in the process, I see three possible responses to the psycho:
First response: understand and heal them.
Second response: tame and harness them.
Third response: disengage and ignore them.
Understanding and healing them is the default response in our therapeutic culture, where evil does not exist, and trauma is the prevalent diagnosis, which defaults to the belief that everything can and should be healed. Unfortunately, this often invokes idiot compassion, where good-hearted people fall into relational traps set by sophisticated manipulators. Additionally, psychos can take advantage of therapeutic culture, but their goal is not to heal; it is to understand the human psyche for greater manipulation.
Taming and harnessing them is an alternative approach, which may seem clever at first glance. Psychos have developed a fearless dominance over their lives, resulting in a propensity for risk-taking and stepping outside unquestioned norms; when combined with a disregard for conventional morality and ontologies, their boldness gives unique skills that allow them to achieve challenging goals effectively. However, taming anything that has not been tamed before requires developing a new skill set, one that will surely lead to moral hazards for those taking up the responsibility of harnessing such individuals.
Disengaging and ignoring them is a self-preservation approach for maintaining one's moral integrity and personal sanity. The popular “gray rock method,” in which one becomes unresponsive, cuts off relational ties, and thereby eliminates negative influence, is probably the wisest approach for most. If enough people disengage, the psycho will collapse and lose their control over others.
Of course, there is a fourth response: fighting and stopping them. One requires strong moral conviction and fortitude to consider this approach wiser than the alternatives. Additionally, fighting psychos can make one become a psycho, as one can easily get seduced into a contest that deeply corrupts through mere engagement.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. - Nietzsche
In any case, it is clear that most people are not morally ambitious enough, resulting in a lack of clarity about the wisest approach. Here is a less foolish perspective: let's view challenging individuals as gifts from God and opportunities to cultivate virtue, thereby giving real saintliness a chance.
