The benefits of psychopathy
In a 1946 article, [American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley] wrote that the typical psychopath will have ‘often outstripped 20 rival salesmen over a period of six months, or married the most desirable girl in town, or, in a first venture into politics, got himself elected into the state legislature’. [source]
The article I wrote about yesterday talked about psychologists who taught psychopaths “cognitive morality.”
In order to be successful, normal people must learn what we might call cognitive psychopathy. For example, PUAs are teaching a type of cognitive psychopathy to their clients, especially with respect to shady PUA tactics like “negging.”
It’s too bad we live in a society where it’s beneficial to be a psychopath.
* * *
21% of corporate CEOs are in the top 1% of psychopathic traits.
Lion of the Blogosphere 
I wonder if it hasn’t ALWAYS been an advantage to be a psychopath, especially of the cognitive variety. Obviously, some modern societies reward this sort of behavior – communist and fascist states, for example. But other societies, even democratic ones, can qualify. I think many of our leaders have psychopathic tendencies. No names, of course, but you can fill in the blanks with your own choices.
BTW, after what happened to Roosh, we all need to protect our real identities on the HBD blogs.
Black Death
July 13, 2018 at 1:38 PM
If psychopathy were beneficial to passing on genes, then EVERYONE would be a psychopath and we wouldn’t have a special name for it because it would be normal.
So if psychopathy seems beneficial today, it must be unique to modern society.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 1:46 PM
Psychopathy can be beneficial to an individual, but is catastrophic when everyone in society has it. That’s the same now as it was 10,000 years ago. This is part of the Darwinian concept of “group selection”.
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 13, 2018 at 2:20 PM
Group selection in humans is nonsense.
JayMan
July 13, 2018 at 11:01 PM
Psychopaths are natural defectors and kind of like predators or parasites in the ecosystem of human society. Their environment only supports their strategy at a certain Nash equilibrium. If there are too many predators and not enough prey, they go hungry and turn on each other.
Giovanni Dannato
July 13, 2018 at 3:04 PM
If women are sexually selecting for psychopathy more now than ever (not sure if that’s the case but many seem to think so) could we reach a tilting point where we produce too many psychopaths and society falls apart? Many PUAs seem to think so but are enjoying the ride as we spiral down the toilet.
Jay Fink
July 13, 2018 at 3:43 PM
“If women are sexually selecting for psychopathy more now than ever (not sure if that’s the case but many seem to think so) could we reach a tilting point where we produce too many psychopaths and society falls apart?”
Yes, exactly! Well-behaved beta males made civilization possible.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 3:54 PM
With a complete automation coming to a full fore in the near future, Type II psychopaths will have a field day once that happens. No more beta males needed for civilization, except for a few who will maintain the cpu, arms and legs of robotron.
JS
July 13, 2018 at 4:50 PM
Psychopathy is not always beneficial.
Here’s a thought experiment: Suppose you have a sudden opportunity to steal from your employer. A psychopath would weigh the risks and benefits without regard to the right or wrong of the situation. A non-psychopath would feel inhibited from doing the deed and might even refrain even if there were a lot to gain with very little downside.
On the surface, it seems like the psychopath would be better off, but the problem he faces is that the cost-benefit analysis is very easy to screw up, which is why so many psychopaths end up in jail or unemployed. The fact is that it’s just too cognitively demanding for most people to go through life like Mr. Spock, analyzing everything rationally and acting accordingly. Most people are much better off following heuristics most of the time, e.g. “don’t steal.”
fortaleza84
July 13, 2018 at 6:24 PM
Hmmm – no psychopaths in ancient Egyptian, Greek or Roman societies? What about the Middle Ages. Seems like there were as many then as now.
Black Death
July 13, 2018 at 8:06 PM
Do psychopaths have more children than normal people? I doubt it, especially not now that we have contraception. For what reason would a psycho even want children? We may see psychos disappearing completly, at least the smart ones.
DataExplorer
July 13, 2018 at 9:23 PM
On the surface, it seems like the psychopath would be better off, but the problem he faces is that the cost-benefit analysis is very easy to screw up, which is why so many psychopaths end up in jail or unemployed.
And the math works against their preferred life choices.
Psychopaths are often obsessed with selecting options that are high reward/high risk. Intelligent psychopaths are especially prone to this mistake because they overestimate their ability to anticipate uncertainty in complex environments.
The problem with consistently pursuing high risk/high reward strategies is that the law of averages strongly works against them being successful long-term: If psychopaths bat anything less than 1000 it takes only 1 miss to wipe out their previous gains.
The Undiscovered Jew
July 13, 2018 at 9:48 PM
The same could be said about all personality variation. We don’t really know why variation in personality exists at all.
JayMan
July 13, 2018 at 11:00 PM
” If psychopaths bat anything less than 1000 it takes only 1 miss to wipe out their previous gains.”
Often the reward isn’t so great in the scheme of things. If you have a $60,000 a year job, it’s really not worth it to steal a $500 piece of equipment from your employer. And yet your typical psychopath is constantly risking his job, his reputation, his friends, etc. over smaller things.
fortaleza84
July 14, 2018 at 6:27 PM
I don’t want to say anything that would reveal this person’s identity, but I knew someone many years ago, who, in hindsight, may have been a psychopath. He was highly intelligent, good looking and outgoing, but there was something of an “empty vessel” about him, as though he had no real passions. Got very good grades without having any sort of academic obsessions, listened to popular bands without seeming to care about them, didn’t read books, things like that. This was in an institution where young people were obsessed with things like that, I guess, like a lot of young people are all over the world.
BUT, he always got the girls. This was before PUA and game, so he just had a knack for it, none of us could really figure it out. And, he lied constantly, lied about things big and small, so this must have helped a lot with the chicks.
Back in the day, many of us believed that he would wind up in jail, it just seemed logical.
However, as far as I can tell, this never occurred. Instead, he rose to an incredibly prestigious position when he was very young and then got swept up in a recession. Another prestigious job followed, and after a major bankruptcy he had a hard time putting anything together, engaged in activities that appeared to by shady, but legal. Now he has a very small time job in sales, far, far below anything that someone with his background would be expected to be doing. Think a Harvard man working as the sales director at the third-largest aluminum siding distribution and installation company in Memphis. Weird like that.
A strange story, but not as strange as this one:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/08/leigh-sprague-i-stole-from-a-putin-crony-110423
The Shepherd
July 15, 2018 at 9:36 AM
Unlike most other mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or autism, there’s no correlation between psychopathy and paternal age. This is strongly indicative that it’s not a disease in the classic sense. The older the father, the more random mutations in the sperm. Hence things like schizophrenia are unintended malfunctions resulting from random deleterious genetic mutations.
In contrast psychopathy is likely an evolutionary strategy. The genes encoding for psychopathy aren’t random mutations. Rather they’ve been amplified by natural selection. At least at certain times and places, psychopathy likely endowed it’s possessor with an evolutionary advantage.
Doug
July 13, 2018 at 1:48 PM
I agree that psychopaths are at the extreme end of personality traits, low neuroticism, low agreeableness, high extroversion, low conscientiousness.
Any of these personality factors that are too extreme (too high or too low) are disadvantageous.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 1:53 PM
Eastern Asiatics tend to score high on neuroticism, low on agreeableness and low on extroversion, hence their “beta” traits, and not so much beta as in cooperativeness, necessitated for civilization creation and maintenance, but beta in terms of novelty seeking, and on a grand scale, trendsetting endeavors. Those “disadvantaged traits” are the precepts that have made Western Civilization the apex of human innovation and experimentation.
JS
July 13, 2018 at 3:20 PM
* high on agreeableness
JS
July 13, 2018 at 3:21 PM
Psychopathy isn’t a mental illness, but part of normal personality variation:
Features and Bugs, by JayMan
JayMan
July 13, 2018 at 7:52 PM
Jayman, I read your post, and many of the comments.
Good stuff!
However, I would like to add this: a society with more psychopaths is also a society where more non-psychopaths get a lot of practice in feeling good about how hard they worked, and how much they learned, when they were happily taking down evil little men (that was kind of Lion’s point when he stressed that psychopath is a word for a type of person whom this society generally puts into prison – i.e., the sort of person who is, in the end, nothing more than target practice for the cops and the prosecutors and the informants).
Bland generic societies without that incentive (the incentive of taking down lots of psychopaths) within their interpersonal relationships often fail, when inter-society conflict unexpectedly occurs — often fail at fighting other generic societies with that incentive. You can’t win a war with trained fighters selected only from the psychopaths in your society, you need lost of non-psycopaths, and, contrary to what many people might believe, psychopaths are not all that effective in battle, their great contribution to society is to have served, in peacetime, as legitimate target practice for the non-psychopath majority, who make up the vast majority of the personnel who have won battles for their people or their nations over the centuries,
No target practice in peacetime, no victories in wartime! As Cochran said, every society selects for something.
howitzer daniel
July 13, 2018 at 9:23 PM
the dark triad HINDERs people.
the likely reason why those types are over-represented in management/etc. whatever is because of the POSITIVE compensatory mechanisms/abilities they have developed in SPITE of their DEFECTS.
and they typically aren’t as good as their peers:
“Hedge fund managers scoring higher for psychopathy perform worse than their colleagues, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Denver and the University of California, Berkeley. They compared the personality traits of 101 hedge fund managers with their investments and financial returns from 2005 to 2015, and found those with greater psychopathic tendencies produced lower returns.”
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20171102-do-psychopaths-really-make-better-leaders
They’re just a type of social fraud.
same thing with ‘bad boys’ or whatever. it’s just the ones who have enough ability or talent or whatever to develop COMPENSATORY mechanisms who succeed.
swank
July 13, 2018 at 1:52 PM
Of course, the most important attribute for BECOMING a hedge fund manager is to be able to SELL your hedge fund to investors, and psychopaths excel at sales more than anything else.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 1:58 PM
I have a former friend who has psychopathic tendencies. He took a sales aptitude test and scored the highest on the test this employer ever saw! This same guy by the way can get any job he applies for…even ones he’s not qualified for. He sweeps every job interviewer off of their feet. Unfortunately he can never hold on to any of these jobs. He has been hired and fired more than anyone I know.
Jay Fink
July 13, 2018 at 2:11 PM
Yes it is too bad. Even if I know it would be to my advantage to have psychopathic qualities I can’t even fake them. It sounds like too much work to me because it goes against my basic nature. I don’t have any issues with guilt and play acting as a psychopath would make me feel guilty because unlike true psychopaths I have a conscience.
Jay Fink
July 13, 2018 at 2:05 PM
I wonder whether that quote really describes the typical psychopath, rather than a high-functioning subset of psychopaths.
I know a guy, call him Joe, who’s almost definitely a psychopath, although I’m not aware that he’s ever been diagnosed. He’s in prison now, and has been behind bars for about half of his (almost 30 year) life. He’s related to some people in my social circle, and everyone’s tried to get him onto the straight and narrow path, although they’ve mostly given up at this point. I’ve known him since his early teens.
Joe’s life followed the typical trajectory, even though his parents are decent, educated people who tried everything to help him. He displayed two of the three “Macdonald triad” traits (and maybe the third for all I know). He was a major problem child from an early age, and transitioned into full-blown criminal activity by high school.
Success with women? In the short term, yes. He also had a very cute girlfriend who stuck with him through a lot of crap and ended up a heartbroken single mom as her reward.
Business success? No. He’s smart, and very smooth, charismatic, and funny when he wants to be. Usually he talks like a gang banger, but he can flip a switch and sound like an NPR reporter whenever he wants. He could definitely be a great salesman for short stretches of time, but he just can’t keep his act together long enough to sustain any extended enterprise.
Any serious profession requires traits other than just charm and charisma. Those are great for a salesman, but he also needs to be reasonably organized, hardworking, and persistent. Joe just gets bored after a while, and causes mayhem to make life more interesting. The business ideal is probably a touch of psychopathy, not a full dose.
Anon1
July 13, 2018 at 2:07 PM
Was he adopted. If not, is his dad sure he’s his father?
Southern
July 13, 2018 at 5:33 PM
not adopted, and his body type seems similar to his dad’s.
Anon1
July 13, 2018 at 7:04 PM
“low neuroticism, low agreeableness, high extroversion, low conscientiousness.”
Sounds like the profile of your typical poor person.
Ronald McDonald
July 13, 2018 at 2:19 PM
Poor people have low IQ and low conscientiousness, not necessarily the other factors.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 3:19 PM
This “psychopathy” fetishism runs in cycles.
In the early fifties, it was Hitchcock and the neo-Freudians talking about psychopaths and their issues. There is actually a very large academic literature of the time and Hitchcock came up with the movie “Rope.”
In the 20’s I think it was Leopold and Loeb.
map
July 13, 2018 at 2:36 PM
Why do people always cite “negging” as the number one ethical concern in pickup?, but nobody talks about techniques for overcoming LMR?
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 13, 2018 at 2:59 PM
Overcoming LMR applies to ALL sales and not just to game.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 3:21 PM
So does negging. I’ve never been particularly interested in PUA content because it’s all just the same sales techniques I already know about.
snorlaxwp
July 13, 2018 at 3:36 PM
Negging is just teasing. It’s ridiculous that it’s thought of as some evil manipulative tool. In LTR, you should be teasing your wife or gf too.
everybodyhatesscott
July 13, 2018 at 3:54 PM
Maybe because it’s emblematic of the women like bad guys trope. What people don’t seem to understand though is the bad guys are incredibly good at coming across as sweet and caring at the outset. It’s only once the relationship is established that they start showing up drunk and whacking you around.
It’s also a simple concept. What little I’ve read of PUA strategy was hopelessly confusing so maybe the other features are too esoteric for popular consumption..
toomanymice
July 13, 2018 at 4:07 PM
“Why do people always cite ‘negging’ as the number one ethical concern in pickup?, but nobody talks about techniques for overcoming LMR?”
Pressuring a woman into having sex with you is a sh*tty thing to do, but the fact that some men do it is not embarassing to women.
By contrast, the fact that women respond positively to men who demean them puts women as a group in a negative light. It implies that they are irrational, irresponsible, emotional, and childish. As a general rule, people get pretty outraged by statements, information, or evidence which put women in a negative light. It’s called “women are wonderful” bias and it’s a very real thing.
fortaleza84
July 14, 2018 at 4:05 AM
Negging done properly is not demeaning, it is just a lite hearted tease that make women smile, if they don’t you haven’t done it properly.
Hashed
July 14, 2018 at 9:44 PM
Whether you call it “demeaning” or a “light-hearted tease,” the point is to undermine the girl’s self-assessment relative to the person doing the negging.
fortaleza84
July 15, 2018 at 4:19 AM
A lot of this I think is that people high in psychopathy behave as if they were high ranking or high status in society without the actual rank or status. That works somewhat well in the society of today because it has way less mechanisms to slap down those who ‘presume too much’ than did earlier iterations of society. Your chance of getting the snot beaten out of you, for instance, for hitting on a pretty girl outside your effective caste is way lower than it used to be. Social status is a weird thing, a lot of it is effectively what you can be seen to be getting away with.
Jehu
July 13, 2018 at 3:13 PM
“It’s too bad we live in a society where it’s beneficial to be a psychopath”
The admissions at Harvard rated Eastern Asiatics poorly on personality tests.
JS
July 13, 2018 at 3:40 PM
Psychopathy is just a word used by betas to describe the alphas who are getting their girl and eating their lunch.
Someone *has* to be on top. That’s just physics.
Acting entitled and bold is a great strategy if you actually are a king, but it is a dumb strategy if you aren’t. You are likely to end in prison for rape or theft.
Rich betas like Bezos or Gates are operating suboptimally compared to a Trump, at least in terms of reproduction. Gates and Bezos, being literally a million times wealthier than the average schmuck should have lots of kids with pretty young things and growing clans. This is bad for the world because the world needs more smarties and less gibs. It is also made for the world because smarties like Bezos and Gates are too politically correct and weak to even talk about the great problem of our age, the demographic and civilizational conquest of the West by barbarians.
Dan
July 13, 2018 at 4:13 PM
“Psychopathy is just a word used by betas to describe the alphas who are getting their girl and eating their lunch.”
Actually, it’s a word used by psychiatrists to describe a certain type of criminal in prison.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 13, 2018 at 4:50 PM
“Psychopathy” isn’t a technical term in psychiatry. The closest thing would be Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Hermes
July 14, 2018 at 10:14 AM
Actually, it’s a word used by psychiatrists to describe a certain type of criminal in prison.
Criminals (non-white collar) have low IQs + psychopathy.
Hi IQ psychopaths have a clear path to the most senior executive positions, provided they don’t suffer a heart attack after snorting a line of crack.
The Undiscovered Jew
July 13, 2018 at 8:41 PM
“Someone *has* to be on top. That’s just physics.”
This is a very unfortunate truth. There *has* to be an authority here on Earth and that authority has to be some asshole human being; not a higher power. Govt is a necessary evil because men are not angels.
That’s why a great yearning of the human heart, an archetype really, is the return of a “true King” someone just and heaven-picked for the role. Otherwise, the role will generally go to a monster (or heartless/brainless/spineless beauracracy); and you just hope the monster is on your side.
fakeemail
July 14, 2018 at 12:24 PM
Lion, Trump just bumped the old Overton window again.
gothamette
July 13, 2018 at 4:38 PM
Complaining about how awful england’s health care system, level of violence, and demographics are compared to the US, when England vastly outperforms the US in all three of those areas, is standard issue GOP idiocy in 2018. Wake me up when he starts talking intelligently about the damage done by Hispanic immigration and the country’s black population.
Magnavox
July 13, 2018 at 7:12 PM
“(CNN)President Donald Trump said Friday that European leaders “better watch themselves” because immigration is “changing the culture” of their societies.
“I think it has been very bad, for Europe. … I think what has happened is very tough. It’s a very tough situation — you see the same terror attacks that I do,” Trump said at a news conference with British Prime Minister Theresa May outside of London.
“I just think it is changing the culture, I think it is a very negative thing for Europe,” Trump said.
“I know it is politically not necessarily correct to say that, but I will say it and I will say it loud,” Trump added.
The President warned that immigration was hurting Germany and other parts of Europe “very much,” apparently referring to a wave of refugees who have entered Europe from shattered Syria and other unstable societies in the Middle East and North Africa.
“I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture, you are changing a lot of things, you are changing security.”
But thanks.
gothamette
July 13, 2018 at 9:01 PM
And why is he too cucked to talk seriously about all the damage done by the great mass of Hispanics who aren’t drug dealing rapist murderers? He hasn’t even talked about hispanic criminals since the beginning of the campaign. And he’s never talked about black criminals, despite the fact that they commit vastly more crime than hispanics.
Examining every little real and imagined flaw in Europe and rooting for them to fail is central to cuckservatism and nothing new.
Magnavox
July 14, 2018 at 12:51 PM
Maggotbox is pulling the same dishonest stunt he always does. He’s angry that Trump isn’t a socialist. So he makes false attacks against him on other issues like immigration. He would rather have socialism than save the country. Anyone who would put his own petty jealousy and greed ahead of the nation is a traitor.
destructure
July 14, 2018 at 5:07 PM
I would rather Trump talk about and address the issues facing america than feed some delusion among ignorant Americans by trash talking Europe.
Magnavox
July 14, 2018 at 7:12 PM
Someone’s got bad hearing, LOL. Trump has been talking about M13, “not sending their best,” and he can’t catch a break here. Anyway….
OT but fun. ScarJo has withdrawn from an indie flick about trannies due to SJW pressure. This is great! The trannies have destroyed an entire genre of degenerate films that Hollywood was poised to make. Nobody wants to see a trannie film with an ugly transgender “actress.” They might have paid to see a trannie film with a dish like ScarJo uglied up, pretending to have a dick. No executive will green light a trannie movie. No insurance co. will sign a completion bond after this travesty.
It’s all good. These assholes don’t realize what they’ve done to themselves.
gothamette
July 14, 2018 at 7:46 PM
“These assholes don’t realize what they’ve done to themselves.”
Good point. Good news.
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 10:22 PM
He talked about Hispanic criminals years ago, while also talking about how overall he loved Hispanics and thought they were great. Never discussed black criminals, neve discussed the kind of negative cultural change he critiqued in Europe. His comments were rude and, in the broader context, stupid.
Magnavox
July 14, 2018 at 11:30 PM
It’s true that Trump skates uneasily on black criminality. That is a huge (or yuge?) problem, but the simple fact is that talking too openly about this will bring on a civil war, and I’m the one who scoffs at the notion that the US will have a civil war. It nearly destroyed the country once, and could do so again.
I’m quite serious when I say that “this issue” is this country’s Achilles heel, and as such must be faced with tact and diplomacy. When Magnavox is older he may understand this. OTOH, maybe he will become an old fool, and there’s no fool like an old fool.
““These assholes don’t realize what they’ve done to themselves.”
Good point. Good news.”
It IS good news, and is indicative of the chaos in the Dem party. I mean this. Lion, everybody — pay attention. You should check out the twitter wars – they reveal a lot.
Check out #neverbernie hashtag on Twitter. They are FURIOUS at Sanders and the Sandernistas for costing them the election (it’s either Bernie or the Russians, or maybe both, I dunno), and from their perspective, I would be too. Totally understandable. But that’s beside the point.
The point: You can’t welcome Ocasio-Cortez into your party and say she’s the future of the Dems, blah blah, and be a #neverbernie – she supported him. They have no leadership. They are tearing themselves apart.
And meanwhile, the Republicans are slowly but surely becoming Trump’s party, make no mistake. As the reality of white demographic decline becomes inescapable, this will intensify. Eventually a core will coalesce and take total control of the country. Thank God for two Senate seats per state.
gothamette
July 15, 2018 at 9:28 AM
Don’t believe me about the chaos in the Democrats?
And it ain’t good chaos that will result in a positive synthesis, that old Marxist/Hegelian stuff. It’s bad chaos, matter anti-matter. They are neutralizing each other.
gothamette
July 15, 2018 at 9:41 AM
Here’s more:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/07/14/combat-political-malpractice-democrats-midwest-sanders-and-ocasio-cortez-joining
The Hillarycrats are FURIOUS at Bernie & AOC for this because they are campaigning against an “out” Native American woman, Sharice Davids, on behalf of two white men. Scroll for the word “misogynist” in the article. This is getting interesting.
gothamette
July 15, 2018 at 9:58 AM
I’ve never been in sales, so I didn’t know what “LMR” means. Googled it, and there are no results, at least for the first 3 pages, indicating the meaning used here. Instead, it’s all about Ford Mustangs. Incidentally, I once overheard a sales guy talking candidly on the phone. It was in a Borders in downtown SF, and he said, “the reason I enjoy sales is I like fucking with people.”
Marty
July 13, 2018 at 5:06 PM
LMR = last-minute resistance
It’s that period of doubt or hesitation just before a customer opens his wallet or a girl opens her thighs.
Pro tip: search for “LMR -Mustang”. Placing a subtraction symbol just before a word excludes that word from search parameters.
Yes, successful salesman are sociopaths, no exceptions.
hard9bf
July 13, 2018 at 7:35 PM
I just read Trump Revealed, by a couple WaPo writers. They don’t use the word sociopath but that’s what he sounds like in his business dealings. Esp the Trump U stuff. But how stupid do you have to be to work over 30k for a standard RE seminar? I can almost see they deserved to be screwed.
But that’s not psychopathy. I do believe Trump cares about his kids if not anyone else.
Mrs Stitch
July 13, 2018 at 10:28 PM
LMR-mustang yields ‘late model restoration’. So much for the pros.0
Marty
July 14, 2018 at 1:37 PM
“But how stupid do you have to be to work over 30k for a standard RE seminar? I can almost see they deserved to be screwed.”
The US Congress? US military? US taxpayers?
The US military spent billions over the past two decades sending GIs to Trump U equivalent ‘colleges’. Ever heard of Trident University? Colorado Technical University? And these bottom feeding schools aren’t even the worst of the bunch.
Worse still, the kids who graduate imagine themselves to be ‘as educated as any Harvard grad’ as one of these folks once proclaimed.
We’ve so cheapened the notion of education I wonder if we can ever return to a system with real standards.
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 1:57 PM
Marty, you need to put a space between the LMR and the hyphen. “LMR -Mustang,” not “LMR-Mustang.” Though that still doesn’t yield any mention of “last minute resistance” or any game sites.
Hermes
July 14, 2018 at 4:41 PM
That should be “LMR -Mustang.” Stupid word wrap.
Hermes
July 14, 2018 at 4:42 PM
They’re still stupid. And deserving to be screwed.
Mrs Stitch
July 14, 2018 at 6:34 PM
“It’s that period of doubt or hesitation just before a customer opens his wallet or a girl opens her thighs.”
When a girl opens her thighs the customer is the man.
gothamette
July 14, 2018 at 7:49 PM
Why do stupid people deserve to be screwed? Do physically weak people deserve to be raped and robbed?
Magnavox
July 14, 2018 at 11:32 PM
Sorry again for being so cryptic. Part of the techniques for overcoming LMR involves understanding the difference between “Stop.”, and “We should stop.” “Stop” means stop. “We should stop” means agree we should stop, and keep going while you’re agreeing. To me that sounds like more of an ethical question than throwing a neg a within the first few minutes of meeting someone.
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 16, 2018 at 10:23 AM
Salespeople who enjoy fucking with others eventually get the word put out on them. “Don’t deal with this guy, he’s bad news.”
njguy73
July 14, 2018 at 12:55 PM
This is true. It’s one thing for a low level salesman to rip someone off. But when you’re dealing with professionals and businesses you’ll only get but one chance to pull that garbage.
destructure
July 14, 2018 at 5:11 PM
Whatever are the benefits, to employment ,or picking up girls, or whatever by behaving like a psychopath, regular men would find faking it to be contrary to their conscience and their inclinations and would therefore feel extremely uncomfortable. The psychological costs would outweigh any benefits.
I am a nice man. I like being a nice man, and furthermore I like the fact that I like being a nice man.
martin2
July 13, 2018 at 5:19 PM
That’s what you keep telling yourself….
GondwanaMan
July 14, 2018 at 8:21 AM
“Whatever are the benefits, to employment ,or picking up girls, or whatever by behaving like a psychopath”
People don’t walk all over you because you’re too busy walking all over them.
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 2:00 PM
All things being equal, most people prefer nice. And one comes out ahead by being nice often enough that it’s worth erring on the side of “nice”. But “nice” doesn’t mean letting others walk all over them. That’s not “nice”. That’s just a wimp. There’s nothing about “nice” that says you can’t beat the hell out of someone who deserves it. Some people need beating. And some people need worse.
destructure
July 14, 2018 at 6:37 PM
Maybe it’s where I live, PNW, but I see almost nothing but nice people getting their asses handed to them by externally polite but aggressive and exploitive bastards each and every day.
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 7:02 PM
Curle — Our comments aren’t contradictory.
I ran across this recent article in Harvard Business Review titled Why Do Toxic People Get Promoted? For the Same Reason Humble People Do: Political Skill. The basic point is that toxic people who rise to the top don’t rise because they’re toxic but because they’re politically skillful. And that more nice people need to become politically skillful as well.
All things being equal, I don’t think toxic people have an advantage over nice people. It’s just that toxic people are more likely to be politically skillful as a result of their dark triad natures. But there are also plenty of nice people who are politically skillful as well. I’d say that nice people who lack political skill are more likely to be taken advantage of and the nice people with political skill aren’t.
To repeat some of my previous comment — All things being equal, most people prefer nice. And one comes out ahead by being nice often enough that it’s worth erring on the side of “nice”. But “nice” doesn’t mean letting others walk all over them. That’s not “nice”. That’s just a wimp.
So my advice for those nice people you see being taken advantage of is to develop the political skill and backbone to take up for themselves. Of course, everyone may not be capable of it.
destructure
July 15, 2018 at 1:35 PM
Re CEOs with psychopathic tendencies, this clip never gets old. Fuld went into investment banking after his military career ended prematurely because he punched his commanding officer.
Anon1
July 13, 2018 at 6:32 PM
Jesus, this guy is terrifying. There is a breed of Jew like Fuld and Weinstein. Their heavy and crooked faces alone make it clear they’d sell their mother for a quarter and much, much worse. Real mobsters.
I love when guys like that show their bleeding-heart liberal bonafides or go on a jag about how Jews are eternal sheep and victims.
fakeemail
July 14, 2018 at 12:10 PM
James Woods played him in TOO BIG TO FAIL. Woods got a rep of being Jewish because he played a lot of smart, slimy, aggressive Jews. He’s really a Wasp, or something.
The most aggressive Jew I ever saw up close was Barry Diller. Reeked of it. Scared me.
gothamette
July 14, 2018 at 7:54 PM
“The most aggressive Jew I ever saw up close was Barry Diller.“
Homo too, right? Like Geffen.
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 10:26 PM
Gothamette – I am surprised at you!
I am sort of a nice guy, and so I am reluctant to do this –
but I want you to imagine the worst people you have ever met, and pretend that you though they “reeked of agressiveness”. then I want you to imagine how God sees you.
And please never again pretend to be an anti-Semite. If you really think that, after all these thousands of years, the Jews are the people who you get to play your scared little bunny card against, well, may God forgive you, Come on you know better.
And, by the way, if this comment was too hard for you to figure out, here is your simplistic take away – don’t talk about Jews with condescencion ever again, Never, my young friend – not maybe “sometimes”, not maybe “not that often” – never. When you talk smack about Jews none of us think of you as a scared little lovable bunny, we just think you are, well, ….
howitzer daniel
July 15, 2018 at 12:10 AM
Excellent series on psychopaths, Lion!
Yakov
July 13, 2018 at 6:33 PM
Excellent series on psychopaths, Lion!
Feline apex predators can survive the urban jungle only if they understand other apex predators.
The Undiscovered Jew
July 13, 2018 at 8:43 PM
Lion, if you don’t mind me asking, how do you score on psychopathy? As well as I remember, I did not score high.
Clay
July 13, 2018 at 8:05 PM
This seems like another case where we have altered the environment in such a way that our genes have not caught up (e.g., obesity due to the abundance of food, especially junk food engineered to appeal to our love of sugar, fat, and salt). PUAs and psychopaths can flourish in an urban landscape where people are more or less anonymous. Someone in an earlier thread talked about practicing game like doing a job. In a clan of 150 people, you can’t as easily fake it until you make it. Everyone knows who is who.
Vince
July 13, 2018 at 11:46 PM
That’s exactly what the game coaches tell you. Approach anxiety made total sense in that environment where failed approaches were costly. Now you shouldn’t care if you blow an approach. In a major city there are more available approaches than you have time in your life to make.
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 16, 2018 at 10:45 AM
In the business world the most successful people that I have dealt with have strong psychopathic tendencies. Think of it like playing Monopoly. During the game you win by playing ruthlessly and being “out for blood”. A normal person can behave this way temporarily because they know it’s just a game and they are not actually hurting anyone. However, in daily life they could not behave that way. The psychopath plays the game of life like that all day everyday because to then it is all just a game.
B.T.D.T.
July 14, 2018 at 8:15 AM
All this talk about psychopaths being excellent salesmen, what a load of fanny fudge. I know about sales, thanks to that horrible time I spent trapped in the straight commission life insurance pyramid scam. Here’s all you need to know about sales, and being in a generous mood I’ll give you this lesson for free even as an MBA school would charge you tens of thousands of dollars:
– if they’re interested, they’ll buy
– if they’re not interested, they won’t buy
– there is essentially nothing a salesman can do to make a difference.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
July 14, 2018 at 10:34 AM
But if they’re on the fence?
Curle
July 14, 2018 at 2:05 PM
Very rare. When I made a presentation to a potential customer I could tell literally within a few seconds whether they were going to buy or not. In most cases it wasn’t even necessary for them to say a word, I could tell from facial expressions and body language. I was right at least 95% of the time.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
July 14, 2018 at 4:22 PM
I imagine it’s the ‘on the fence’ region the salesmen learn to exploit. In terms of PUA stuff, the main obstacle I see is women are like sharks smelling blood when it comes to sensing social awkwardness and nerdiness in men. It’s like a spinning beacon of neon light to us. So when a nerdy guy falsely postures aggression, cockiness or sexual capacity he’s just going to look stupid unless he can catch her in a fence state of mind, ie drunk, mad at some other guy, feeling especially needy or insecure. Probably the best salesmen learn to orchestrate those on-fence mental states.
Why women despise nerds is a mystery to me, since they keep civilization running. Maybe nerdy men are more likely to carry genes associated with poor health, like autoimmune disease.
toomanymice
July 14, 2018 at 6:21 PM
“Why women despise nerds is a mystery to me”
Probably because in the ancestral environment, life was pretty brutal. There would have been regular and severe shortages of food, etc. In all this carnage, it would have been a big advantage to be the tribal leader or one of his friends. Or his lover or child.
fortaleza84
July 15, 2018 at 4:35 AM
That may explain attraction to high status/ powerful men but not necessarily the visceral aversion to nerds. It’s something women feel on a physical level, kind of how animal groups shun other animals with small deformities like a kinked tail.
toomanymice
July 15, 2018 at 5:53 PM
“That may explain attraction to high status/ powerful men but not necessarily the visceral aversion to nerds”
The way female biology works, mating with a mediocre man is a potential disaster since, if she gets knocked up, a woman is out of the game for a year and loses her chance to mate with Mr. Big for at least a year. By contrast, if a man mates with a mediocre woman, it doesn’t prevent him from impregnating some hottie the next day.
The upshot of this is that women have a very negative attitude towards men they deem undesirable. At a deep instinctual level. What’s interesting is that women are often unaware just how much they loath such men and frequently come up with amusing rationalizations for their aversion to such men. That’s why red-pilled guys always roll our eyes when we hear some woman complaining about a man who tried to start a conversation with her. Inevitably she will point to the circumstances (e.g. he talked to her at the gym; or on an elevator; or while she was with her friends; or while she was alone, etc.) when the reality is that he was insufficiently attractive and she would have no complaints at all if he had been attractive to her.
fortaleza84
July 15, 2018 at 7:45 PM
Ironman, how do you get the names of interested people?
njguy73
July 14, 2018 at 3:09 PM
A good salesman special skill is quickly filtering out the No’s to find the Yes’s.
Paul Ryan's Sickly Old Lap Dog
July 14, 2018 at 7:57 PM
My impression is that there are salesmen out there who are consistently successful. If true, this undermines your hypothesis. Perhaps a lot of the consistently successful salesmen are cheating in some way, e.g. by bribing purchasing agents. Which probably happens a lot with commercial and institutional sales, but what about with consumer products like cars and life insurance?
One thing I’ve noticed is that star salemen (and saleswomen) tend to be physically attractive people. From this, I think that salespeople do in fact push a lot of fence sitters, enough that sales ability makes a difference.
fortaleza84
July 15, 2018 at 9:12 AM
Based on my experience in the straight commission life insurance pyramid scam, the VERY few salesmen who were successful (well under 5%) had extensive business experience before going into insurance sales and were able to draw upon all the contacts they had.
Sales skills might count for more in the types of sales where customers come to you, such as auto and appliance sales.
Peter
ironrailsironweights
July 15, 2018 at 8:53 PM
Let me ask you this: What is your age; current profession and income; height, weight, and marital status?
fortaleza84
July 16, 2018 at 4:37 AM
Nah. Some people are good at sales, and others aren’t. Excellent salespeople will not hesitate to use a time-honored technique called “lying.” I also agree with the above comment that being physically attractive helps; I know this because it’s harder for me to say “no” to an attractive woman. Hell, who do pharmaceutical companies hire to sell to doctors? Young babes.
When I worked at a for-profit college, they had salespeople giving prospective students the grand tour. One of their best was a young woman informally known as “Prom Queen.” She was 5’10” and total knockout. I’d see her parading young men down the hall (often military veterans), and I knew they didn’t stand a chance. The head honcho once told us they were “selling a dream.” This meant taking advantage of minorities who didn’t know any better.
Vince
July 15, 2018 at 4:28 PM
“who do pharmaceutical companies hire to sell to doctors? Young babes.”
That’s because the most difficult part of selling to doctors is getting an audience with them, doctors have a lot of gatekeepers. But the doctor will gladly listen to a sales pitch by a young babe because he wants to spend ten minutes in the presence of a young babe, and not because he wants to hear a sales pitch.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 15, 2018 at 4:32 PM
There’s an IT recruiting company that does the same thing. They have local offices for the companies they provide staff to. Each office has a senior person who knows about the hiring decisions each local customer makes. The junior people for each office are young women who recently graduated from college.
While researching this company on glassdoor, I found out what the interview questions for their junior people are. One thing they all get asked is: what your father does for a living. The company also asks about their college cheerleading squad activities.
I think this is an effective strategy. As much as this blog likes to bash the value of the cubicle dweller, when somebody has in demand IT skills, they can get a lot of recruiters trying to get their attention. Hiring cheerleaders to Skype with IT workers is a good way to ensure that your call gets returned once you have a match for a job.
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 16, 2018 at 11:23 AM
So why do some salesmen make large sums of money every year, while others barely scrape by? If the skill didn’t matter, wouldn’t all the salesmen in the same job have their results converge to the same average (in much the way coin toss results for a fair coin always converge)?
MoreSigmasThanYou
July 16, 2018 at 10:52 AM
Lion you should do a write-up about the Myers-Briggs personality types. It’d also be interested to know what kind of personalities congregate on this blog. For example, I’m INTP and I get the sense that a significant numbers of people here might be as well. In fact, any profile of your fan base (outside their politics, which we know in tedious detail at this point) would be insightful.
Roli
July 15, 2018 at 5:20 AM
I am sure that most readers are “INT-”
Which if true, I guess proves that Myers-Briggs is validated for something.
Lion of the Blogosphere
July 15, 2018 at 8:19 AM
I’m ENTP-A according to test results. Pretty accurate IMO.
Yakov
July 15, 2018 at 9:48 AM
Yakov, I knew you’d be an E.
Roli
July 15, 2018 at 2:47 PM
INTJ
Anon1
July 15, 2018 at 10:35 AM
I’m ESTJ
Jay Fink
July 15, 2018 at 2:34 PM
Just took it, says I’m INTJ-T. No clue what it means.
toomanymice
July 15, 2018 at 2:57 PM