Dealing with Psychopaths

My wife and I are watching a remarkably well made TV series from Norway. It's about four rich guys who get together to enjoy what they each perceive as the good life. They are all cynics, and believe in hedonism as a lifestyle. However, they also have their own quirks that make them distinctly different from each other. There's the controlling husband. There's the man who refuses to tell a lie. There's the aimless drifter to whom nothing but immediate pleasures hold any value, and there's the suicidal one with money trouble.

I have not seen the end of the series, but I suspect the aimless drifter will end up helping his suicidal friend in some way. We have already been introduced to his sniper rifle and his stack of cash, so this is pretty much a certainty. However, the more interesting sub-plot is the dynamics between the controlling husband and his wife, and how the guy who refuses to tell a lie blows up that relationship.

The controlling husband uses typical psychopath trickeries to control his wife. All troubles in their relationships are ascribed to her. She's too concerned with what he's up to. She's reading too much into things. She's overreacting. Their failure to get kids are due to her being too tense and anxious. Additionally, he makes her financially dependent on him by insisting that she enjoys her life without any worry about money. He's dishing out money in order to control her.

All of this has the effect of making his wife deeply insecure about everything. She internalizes these insecurities, and defends her husband whenever someone points out that he's not as loving towards her as he should be. However, all it takes for the spell to be broken is a few well chosen words from the guy who tells no lies. When she asks him if her husband would be a good father, his reply is no. Not only would her husband be a terrible father, he's sterile. There will be no children, at least not with her husband.

With the spell broken, control is lost, and the final episode will show how quickly everything unravels.

The story is accurate on all levels. I used to live among this kind of people, and the atmosphere and the way they talk and dress is spot on. The dark humor equally so. Many of the details are taken from real events, which further adds to the sense that these people really do exist. But the story is not in the end about the financial elite of Oslo. The plot has a universal angle to it. It shows how money is but a means to an end, and that this can be used constructively or destructively.

The guy that tells no lies is brutally honest because he can afford it. The controlling husband cares not for money but for control. The aimless drifter doesn't care about anything but his own pleasures. The only one obsessing about money is the one in money trouble.

With this in mind, it's a lot easier to understand what's going on in the world of politics. The psychopaths have taken over, and they care not for money because they can print as much of it as they like. What they want is control, and they want it for no other reason than control itself. This is pretty much identical to the dysfunctional relationship between the controlling husband and his wife.

We are encouraged to stop working and depend on the state for money instead. We're constantly blamed for all the faults in the world. Be it the virus or the climate, it's all due to our selfish and narrow minded view of the world.

Those in the grip of the psychopaths go around defending their oppressors in much the same way that the dependent wife defends her psychopath husband. No amount of arguments or logic will make them change their minds. However, a few well chosen words of truth will break the spell, and from what I see around me, it looks like people are waking up to the fact that government is an institution that attracts psychopaths by its very nature.

Government is about control. It's about forcing people into doing things that they would not otherwise do. With free access to money, there's basically no limit to how deranged government will get, and what we've seen over the past years and a half is proof of this.

But the psychopaths have a problem. Once people wake up, they can no longer be controlled, and this appears to be happening everywhere. All it takes to continue the awakening is to speak the truth. No-one has to shout anything from rooftops. If we merely state the obvious whenever appropriate, people will wake from their slumber and realize that the government is not some benevolent father, but a controlling husband of the most abusive kind.

Boris Johnson

By Ben Shread / Cabinet Office, OGL 3, Link