On defeating a sociopath
Monday, November 9th, 2020There are people who really, genuinely, believe, as far as you can dig down, that winning is everything—that however many lies they told, allies they betrayed, innocent lives they harmed, etc. etc., it was all justified by the fact that they won and their enemies lost. Faced with such sociopaths, people like me typically feel an irresistible compulsion to counterargue: to make the sociopath realize that winning is not everything, that truth and honor are terminal values as well; to subject the sociopath to the standards by which the rest of us are judged; to find the conscience that the sociopath buried even from himself and drag it out into the light. Let me know if you can think of any case in human history where such efforts succeeded, because I’m having difficulty doing so.
Clearly, in the vast majority of cases if not in all, the only counterargument that a sociopath will ever understand is losing. And yet not just any kind of losing suffices. For victims, there’s an enormous temptation to turn the sociopath’s underhanded tools against him, to win with the same deceit and naked power that the sociopath so gleefully inflicted on others. And yet, if that’s what it takes to beat him, then you have to imagine the sociopath deriving a certain perverse satisfaction from it.
Think of the movie villain who, as the panting hero stands over him with his lightsaber, taunts “Yes … yes … destroy me! Do it now! Feel the hate and the rage flow through you!” What happens next, of course, is that the hero angrily decides to give the villain one more chance, the ungrateful villain lunges to stab the hero in the back or something, and only then does the villain die—either by a self-inflicted accident, or else killed by the hero in immediate self-defense. Either way, the hero walks away with victory and honor.
In practice, it’s a tall order to arrange all of that. This explains why sociopaths are so hard to defeat, and why I feel so bleak and depressed whenever I see one flaunting his power. But, you know, the great upside of pessimism is that it doesn’t take much to beat your expectations! Whenever a single sociopath is cleanly and honorably defeated, or even just rendered irrelevant—no matter that the sociopath’s friends and allies are still in power, no matter that they’ll be back to fight another day, etc. etc.—it’s a genuine occasion for rejoicing.
Anyway, that pretty much sums up my thoughts regarding Arthur Chu. In other news, hooray about the election!