MIND READERS DICTIONARY : Mind Readers Dictionary

What is with him? How can he believe such garbage? It's so bad it's not even wrong. It's worse than wrong!

Sometimes I think he's just clueless. He simply can't see the truth.

But then other times I get this whiff of the devious and think he can see the truth just fine but refuses to. For selfish reasons. To get what he wants, he's pretending he can't see. It's all a con. He's manipulating me.

But then I feel bad for assuming the worst. Maybe he’s neither clueless nor lying. He’s just loyal elsewhere. To keep the people in his world happy he’s forced to believe that stuff.

You know how it is. To keep your job, to maintain harmony with your spouse you have to believe certain things. It’s not even a conscious decision. You just fall into falsehoods to keep the peace.  It’s not enough to claim to believe those things, because the people you’re around a lot, they’ll see it on your face. To be consistently and reliably diplomatic and tactful with the folks around him, he believes what he has to. You only believe what you can afford to believe.

And sure, maybe the same is true for me. Maybe my social pressures distort my reality too.  For all I know, he’s more realistic than I am.  Who am I to say what’s true.

Except for one little fact, which is that what he believes is total bullshit, and like I say, sometimes I think he’s just screwing with me. With a con artist, being empathetic is pathetic.  I should defend the truth against his lies, fight him, get right up in his face.

Though of course, not if he’s just clueless.  I mean what are you going to do?  Chew some guy out for not knowing better when it’s simply beyond him to understand?  That’s tacky.

Clueless, Lying, Loyal?

Most psychological dilemmas are, at core a choice between three mutually exclusive options.  Something feels wrong, and you’ve got three ways to interpret what it is.  Your three interpretations each point to a different response and the responses are at odds with each other.

Take a partner’s persistently and distractingly annoying habit of picking his teeth. You have three options:

1. Accommodating it requires that you learn to ignore the problem. You maintain your commitment to the partnership by getting over your annoyance.

2. Fighting it requires that you stay vigilant, paying attention to the annoyance and letting your partner know it bugs you. You maintain your commitment to the partnership by making it meet your standards.

3. Leaving it requires not working to sustain the partnership.  You don’t have to change; your partner doesn’t have to change. You just go your separate ways.

These three response options go by different names in different contexts:

Fight, flight and fear: In response to a predator, an organism fights for dominance, escapes interaction, or displaying fear demonstrates accommodation.

Exit, voice and loyalty: In politics, a frustrated citizen can leave the country, voice his opposition or, out of loyalty accommodate the frustration.

Win, lose or draw in games; Innocent, guilty and nolo contendere in law; dominance, subordination and disengagement in game theory--we choose one or another of these forks depending on how we interpret the source of the problem.

We also have names for the three core interpretations. For example, when there’s a problem between you and me, I can interpret the problem’s origin as in you, in me or in us. If I decide that the problem originates in you, I’ll fight you. If I decide I’m the problem I’ll accommodate you. If I decide the problem originates in us, and our bad chemistry, I’ll suggest that we go our separate ways. Call it the “Youmeus Point,” the point when a problem arises and you wonder “Is it you, is it me or is it us?”

And actually there are two Youmeus points, two interpretation q

That's the fourth time she's done it and this time you're not going to let it pass. Carefully, diplomatically you tell her that she has got to stop insulting you in front of your friends. It's getting weird. If she has complaints and criticisms, you want her to talk with you about them frankly and privately, rather than attacking you indirectly and publicly.

She listens and then pleasantly, earnestly, as if trying to reassure you, says, “It is not my intent to insult and attack you.  I would never want to do that.”

There. Satisfied?

I didn’t think so.  Or try these:

Your child has a C- minus average, but when you confront him, he most earnestly whines, “But I really want to get good grades!”

Your husband won’t share the housework but when you ask him to help more he says, “I mean to help.  I would never want you to feel our relationship was unfair.”

It’s as if to say, “My intentions are good.  Don’t they count for everything?”  It’s as if to say “I’m a good listener, I’m being agreeable, and I’m on the same page with you. So shut-up because you’re wrong about me. You’re intuitions are unfounded.”

And it’s a natural response we’re all capable of giving, indeed, given how minds work, a response we’re naturally inclined toward giving.

We humans are the world’s first fully bi-mundial species. We live in two worlds, the real and the imagined.  The real is what confronts us physically through our senses--both physical feedback (the brick wall you bump into), and feedback from other people (the C-).

Imagination is a new-fangled ability made possible by our capacity for language, our ability to construct mental word-pictures. Imagination makes us humans preternaturally ambitious, visionary, innovative, entrepreneurial, proactive, delusional, woo-woo, clueless, dangerous, and out of touch. It’s what made Steve Jobs so visionary, and that pompous jerk you know such a total pain in the butt.

Our bi-mundiality is a big, risky evolutionary experiment, and its outcome is very much up in the air.  It’s the source of both what could ruin us (climate chaos, economic folly) and save us (new energy technologies, better economic modeling).

When we bi-mundials are confronted by discouraging real-world evidence, our first inclination is to retreat into our imaginations.  When someone says, “You’re doing harm,” it’s as if we close our eyes to get a second opinion from ourselves about ourselves.

And the likeliest second opinion amounts to:

“Yeah, sorry, I just checked with myself.  I asked myself point blank whether I want to do harm, and nope, you’re wrong.  I aspire to be a good person. My intentions are positive. I looked right at myself and that’s not me. I even checked with myself twice. And I agree with me.”

We naturally or deliberately overlook the complex tensions between our often-conflicting desires.  Your partner genuinely wants to have been nice to you, but that doesn’t always trump her desire to one-up you. You child wants to have gotten good grades, but that doesn’t always trump his desire to watch a lot of TV.  Your husband wants to have helped, but that doesn’t always trump his desire to hang out on the Internet.

One common manifestation of our bi-mundiality is what I call “speaking in the aspirational tense.” We say what we hope will become true as though it’s already true.

For example, an hour ago I threw out my pack of cigarettes, and now I proudly declare, “I quit smoking!” I really mean that I aspire to quit smoking but I say it as though I’m stating established fact.   I say, “I hate cigarettes” as though that’s my only feeling about them. I ignore my other feelings about them, hoping they’ll go away.

The aspirational tense plays out as wishes touted as realities. It’s als

"The secret to a stable relationship like ours," she said proudly," is give and take, a real 50/50 balance."

I should look at her while she's talking to me, but I'm sneaking peeks at him, checking for a reaction. I know the couple well and you would have to cook the books pretty creatively to call their relationship 50/50. My guess is closer to 90/10. In our circles she's notorious for her demands and expectations. She takes up a lot of space which he supplies with nary a flinch.

How does that work?

My guess is that it's a 50/50 balance around a 90/10 set point. In other words, they're still negotiating a little give and take, but it's between say, 87/13, and 93/7.

He doesn't flinch because he's not wondering about the set point. He's not wondering because the variation around the set point feels easy and balanced, sloshing gently and reliably around even a set point as skewed as theirs'.

How are set points negotiated? Let's start by noticing the continuum between business and friend relationships. In business we audit who owes what. In friendship we try not to audit. Love is ideally way over on the friendship side of the continuum, so far over into ignoring who owes what that it's unsafe to love just anyone. You better pick your lover carefully or you'll end up failing to audit a joint account you share with an embezzler.

To get to where we can ignore who owes what therefore takes a paradoxical blend of auditing and not auditing, carefully keeping track of who owes what so you can get to where you can afford to ignore who owes what. We'll call this the Auditor's Paradox: It takes auditing to stop auditing. To get safely to a set point where you can say, "who's counting?" you have to count who owes what.

Keeping track of who owes what has a lot in common with double-entry bookkeeping. Each partner holds and maintains an intuited ledger; a ledger that registers what each gets and gives with each other. When negotiating set points, partners audit, discussing discrepancies as they arise. For example, when a partner says, "You don't appreciate what I did for you last week," it's the equivalent to "What I did for you last week is recorded in my ledger as accounts receivable, but you don't seem to have it recorded in your ledger as accounts payable."

We mark and audit our transactions using the conventional terms of etiquette. For example terms like "please" "thank you," and "sorry" all mean, "I'm registering this transaction as establishing a debt to you, something I will add to my accounts payable, and you can add to your accounts receivable." These terms say, "I hereby acknowledge that I am receiving something from you." They're like receipts.

How about invoices? When you say, "Well...OK, here you go," as you grant a favor, it can be like invoicing, like saying "In giving this favor, I'm recording in my accounts receivable a debt you now owe me."

But what if instead you say, "not a problem," "no worries" or "don't mention it" as you grant a favor? Those don't sound like invoices. Taken literally they mean something more like "I'm not keeping track of the favor I just granted. You need not register it in your accounts payable, because I'm not registering it in my accounts receivable."

What's up with that?

Auditing is toxic buzz-kill to friendship and especially to love. Imagine billing your friends for the Thanksgiving dinner you provide them, or giving your partner an itemized list of the expenses you've incurred in your relationship.

But given the Auditor's Paradox, auditing is also necessary. We shouldn't pair with someone who systematically cooks the books in his or her favor, so we have to audit some. But we also shouldn't stay with someone who is constantly auditing, so we try to offset auditing's buzz-kill by bestowing romantically lavish acts of kindness, acts that seem t

Maybe they just didn't hear you. Or maybe they heard you just fine and have decided that you're an idiot, not even worth responding to.

Maybe they got your message but are simply too busy to respond. Maybe they're just quietly thinking it over and still haven't decided. Maybe they're so apologetic that they don't know what to say.  Maybe they're just having fun leaving you dangling.

Whatever it is, it has been longer than you expected.  The silence is deafening. What does it mean?

Maybe you should resend your message. After all, if they didn’t hear you, they’ll be glad you resent it. But if they’re just busy or quietly thinking it over, then your pestering them could turn them against you. And if they think you’re an idiot, maybe it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Or maybe, if they’ve decided you’re an idiot you should defend yourself. If they’re going to be that disrespectful, let them know what you really think.

But again, what if they never got the message in the first place, or they’re busy or just thinking it over, or are just feeling bad.  If that’s the situation, then giving them a piece of your mind will prove that you’re an idiot. Lincoln said, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” That probably applies to responding to silence too.

Better to just wait.  They’re probably just busy, right?  Be patient… Wait… Maybe forever. Wait for people who probably think you’re such an idiot that they don’t need to respond.

Or just ask them, maybe.  Ask them what’s up. They won’t mind.  Unless they think you’re a pest.  A needy pest over-anxious and supplicating: “Did you get my message?  What did you think?  I desperately need to know what you think.”

This is infuriating. Even if they are busy, it’s clear they don’t respect you.

What’s worse, their silence is like a shell game.  Whatever you do, you’ll reveal what you think their silence means and then—switcheroo--they can just change their explanation. You can say “You’re not speaking to me because you think I’m an idiot, right?” and even if that’s exactly why, they can always say, “My aren’t you paranoid. Actually, we’ve just been really busy.” Or you can say “You’ve been too busy to respond, right?” and even if that’s their story they can switch it, saying “My aren’t you paranoid.  Actually we were thinking about it.”

Their shell game is as bad as “I’m thinking of a number between one and ten.” Whatever you guess, they can claim they were thinking of a different number.

What’s worse still, no matter how crazy their silence drives you, they’re unassailable.  They can always say “What? We didn’t do or say anything!” Silence pleads innocence whether it’s innocent or not.

Bob Monkhouse says “Silence is not only golden; it is seldom misquoted.” That’s cute but it’s absolutely wrong. There’s probably no communication more misquoted than silence. It’s very hard to know what it says.

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Silence is a window into a fundamental misunderstanding in semiotics, the study of signs. In general and even in academic research, we assume that a sign is a thing. We say, “A green light means go,” as though the meaning was in the light itself.

But if signs are things, are all things signs? How do we know which things are signs and which things aren’t?  And what about silence?  It’s not a thing. How can the absence of a thing be a sign? And yet it is. The absence of a tax form on April 15 is a sign to the IRS.  The absence of the supper you were expecting can be a very big sign served up to you by your soon-to-be ex-partner.

We live in an era that people will look back upon as misguidedly thingish.  We’re sailing on the successes of a 350-year campaign to exp

After I left the world's largest hippie commune but before I cut off my long hair, it occurred to me that the two central tenets of our hippie beliefs were on a collision course with each other. We were talking out both sides of our mouths, saying opposite, irreconcilable things. On the one hand we were saying, "We are all one on this spaceship earth and must act together to save it." On the other we were saying “If it feels good do it.”

For the most part, we we’re oblivious to the clash. Like the cat fancier who collects all the adorable strays without noticing the catfights escalating, most people collect any and all ideas that move them without noticing where they are at odds with each other.

When the Youngblood’s sang “Come on people now, everybody get together,” we’d say “Yeah, right on.” When the Isley’s sang, “It’s your thang, do what you wanna do…” we’d say, “Yeah, right on.”

To the extent we did think about how to weave together our collective and individualistic principles, to patronizingly and paradoxically teach the world to sing in perfect harmony a song of freedom, we had two basic theories:

1. Doing what’s good for the collective is really everybody’s thang: Take meat for instance. Spaceship earth couldn’t really handle all of us wanting to eat a lot of meat. It’s not in the collective interest for you to want meat, but the good news is that in your heart of potentially clogged hearts you don’t really want to eat meat anyway. Sure you might think you want a Big Mac, but you don’t really. No, you really lust for tofu.

2. That doing our various individual things would create a harmonious melting pot collective future: You could get this impression from our festivals (still can, for example this week at Burning Man). At Woodstock, for instance where the Republican farmer who leased the land marveled before the crowd that “a half million young people can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and music, and I God Bless You for it!”

The secret was three days. Yes, for a brief time the melting pot is harmonious, but having lived on the commune where we attempted to extend indefinitely our union in liberty it became more difficult.

Lately I’ve been reading Republican scholars explain the conservative tradition. Its legs, they all agree are three:

1. Commitment to traditional values,

2. Commitment to individual liberty, and

3. Opposition to communism.

Growing up I mostly associated Republicanism with anti-communism. With the Soviet’s demise and China’s embrace of capitalism, we heard less about communism for a time. These days, the anti-communist leg of Conservatism’s tripod has re-extended itself as fierce opposition to socialism. The conservatives I know use the USSR as the exemplar of socialism's failure but modern socialism is actually a mixed economy, a style with more mixed success than the USSR, which professed communism, but was actually a totalitarian dictatorship (which historically come in lots of flavors--capitalist, Islamic, communist, Christian).

The other two legs of the conservative tripod—liberty and traditional values are wobbling in relation to each other these days as conservatives advocate a libertarian theocracy, a government that gets out of our way but also bans gay marriage.

According to New York Times/CBS New surveys, in 14 months the number of Americans who have an unfavorable opinion of the Tea Party has risen from 18 to 40 percent. Today, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups they asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats, and is even less popular than much maligned groups like “atheists” and “Muslims.” Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Commenting on the

Do you watch movies and TV, read fiction, follow politics or like good gossip? If you do, then chances are you're a lifelong student of Villainology, the study of what makes bad guys bad and mean people suck. Criminology is something else, the study of people who break laws. A lot of the world's worst villains climb to positions of power without breaking the law.

We start our children into Villainology young with easy detection tests, bad guys who look mean in their black hats and warty furrowed brows. With as much time as we story-lovers spend in the company of bad guys, it's a fair bet we're all looking for clues to detecting villains before they do us harm, budding tyrants in the home, at work or in society at large.

So really, how can we tell who's a budding tyrant?

It matters since we have to nip them in the bud before their tyranny takes hold. These days there are lots of people in politics crying "Tyranny!" Who should you believe? Some say beware the Socialists, Christian Fundamentalists, Communists, Conservatives, Muslims or Libertarians, but you can't tell budding tyrants by their affiliations. Historically, tyranny has made itself at home in every political, religious, and philosophical movement.

At its heart tyranny is a lack of conscience, and here we can distinguish three forms. First, there are psychopaths who have an organic absence of conscience. They test as having no affect for example when seeing images of gruesome cruelty that would make anyone else's heart jump.

Second, there's sociopathy, an extraordinary absence of conscience in one context because conscience is committed elsewhere. The family celebrating the death of their suicide bomber son and his hundreds of victims may seem, like psychopaths to show a complete lack of conscience, but they would insist that they don't care about the lives lost because they are so conscientious about serving other communities and God. Unlike psychopathy, sociopathy is not a permanent condition but a behavior, one that can only be ascribed relative to some social norm. For example our side's soldier is trained to show no conscience toward the enemy combatants he kills. To us, he's not a sociopath; he's a hero. The enemy's soldiers are sociopaths because, by our social norms his supposed higher purposes do not justify his lack of conscience toward us.

And then there's the third form, normal, everyday conscience allocation. Conscience, if it's more than lip service is expensive. To show conscientious consideration to others means exerting yourself on their behalf. You have finite powers of exertion, and therefore have to subordinate and prioritize whether consciously or unconsciously, where you expend conscientious care.

This is why "Do onto others what you would have them do onto you," while a lovely sentiment, is impossible to put into full practice. You can't help disappoint others, doing to them what you wouldn't have done onto you.

And visa versa. Bosses let us go, partners dump us, friends turn us down, children fail to fulfill our hopes. Sometimes it really hurts. Why would they do such a thing? Most of the time, bless their souls, because they are being conscientious elsewhere, allocating their finite and expensive conscientiousness as they see fit, disappointing though it may be to us.

"Ah," you might counter, "But that's just disappointment. That's not the same thing as cruelty, which is what the Golden Rule is really talking about," to which I'd say "Exactly. Thank you for taking this where we need to go."

To tell who's a budding tyrant in politics but also at home and at work, we need to be able to tell who's a psychopath, who's acting sociopathically and who's just doing normal, everyday conscience allocation.

Psychopaths know how to frame their exclusively self-serving agendas as serving some higher cause. When they're going

If you want a simple but accurate explanation for why civilizations sometimes veer toward evil, here's a theory worth considering: Psychopaths are overrepresented in positions of power and they make sociopaths out of large numbers of us.

Robert Hare, psychology's most famous expert on psychopaths distinguishes psychopaths from sociopaths as follows.

Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves … Sociopathy is not a formal psychiatric condition. It refers to patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are considered antisocial and criminal by society at large, but are seen as normal or necessary by the subculture or social environment in which they developed.

After WWII, many people suspected that there might be something about the German temperament that made them so willing to comply with Hitler’s orders to hurt fellow humans. In one of psychology’s most famous experiments Stanley Milgram demonstrated that most of us, regardless of race, religion, gender or nationality will readily comply with an authority figure’s instructions to hurt fellow humans.

In Milgram’s experiment a man in a white lab coat instructed subjects to administer what they believed to be successively intense electrical shocks to another person. Coaxed only by such statements as “Please continue,” and “The experiment requires that you continue,” 65% of subjects inflicted the maximum 450-volt shock and none of the remaining 35% insisted the experiment be terminated or left the room to check the health of the victim without requesting permission to leave.

All right, so it’s not just the Germans. More generally then, what would make any of us sociopathically deferential to a Hitler-like psychopath? Are we all subconsciously sadistic?

No, we’re subconsciously bovine. We become herd animals and follow the leader.

Once we have determined that someone is in a position of moral leadership, we shift from moral autonomy to moral deference.

We don’t shirk responsibility so much as surrender it to a higher power and it’s understandable that we would. A true moral leader deserves our allegiance and support. Aligning with moral leadership lends our leverage to his or her righteous cause. Think of where we would be today without the allied soldiers’ deference to moral leadership in WWII. We survived Hitler because the Greatest Generation sacrificed their moral autonomy to true moral leaders. Theirs was not to wonder why; theirs was just to do or die.

The problem isn’t in our deference to moral leaders but in how lousy we are at determining who is a moral leader. Hitler wasn’t one and yet masses of people thought that he was.

Our deference explains why psychopaths are over-represented in positions of power. By their nature psychopaths have no conscience and will fight as dirty as they can get away with fighting. This gives them an enormous edge in competition.

Just think how your fortunes would rise in any game if you could cheat and your opponent couldn’t. A psychopath’s fortunes would rise in game play too but not nearly so much as they rise in politics.

In games the line between fair and unfair play is well defined so it’s easy to spot cheaters. In politics the line is fuzzier which makes it harder to spot cheaters, easier to cheat, and easier for the psychopath to defend himself by pleading ignorance and self-defense saying, “I don’t think I crossed the line and anyway I think my opponent crossed it so, if I got close to the line it was merely in self defense.”

Also, clearly the object in games is to win and therefore deferring like a herd animal to a moral leader would be absurd. You probably haven’t done that since you were cowed at seven into teaming up with your big brother to beat your little brother at Monopoly. As

In economist Ha-Joon Chang's wonderful book, "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism," the first of the 23 things is that there are no absolutely free markets.

Think about it. If freeing up markets were always the solution, then wouldn't we allow the purchase of slaves, hiring of eight year olds, and immigration of anyone who wanted to work here at any price? No free market purist can or would advocate these things. So where do they draw the line?

Wherever they want. And then they pretend there is no line. They claim to be purists. No fine-line—to every question the answer is always completely free markets. But they never really mean it. Like all of us they have to draw fine lines between for example leaving things to markets and regulating things like child labor. When they say free, they mean freer and certainly not across the board. They mean freer on whatever they happen to want freer.

Moral relativism has a bad reputation these days. I think immoral relativism is worse, the immorality of relativism dressed up in absolute purity’s clothing: Bible interpreters who claim to be literalists, self-proclaimed “originalists” whose supposedly literal read of the Constitution is as much an interpretation as anyone else’s, conservatives who demand a return to the only true and pure values while cherry-picking the values they value, and liberals too who pretend they believe in the pure principle of love when they, like the rest of us are picking and choosing.

Advocating a self-serving position in the name of absolute purity is the putrefaction of democratic discourse. And blindness to one’s own biases is no excuse so long as you’re out there accusing everyone else of being biased.

Here’s how to be an immoral relativist:

1. Paint a bull’s eye that pinpoints your own biased opinion as the center point, the goal, the ideal, the pure non-divergent position.

2. Forget that you did this.

3. Point to the bull’s eye you’ve painted and shout at people, “Can’t you see? Isn’t it obvious that the pure unadulterated, unbiased absolute center, the balanced, fair and perfect position, is right here at the center of this objectively crafted bull’s eye?!

The technique goes way back. Try this from Plato’s dialogues:

Socrates. And what is piety, and what is impiety?

Euthyphro. Piety is doing as I am doing…

Socrates. …I would rather hear from you a more precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the question, What is "piety"? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do...

Euthyphro. And what I said was true, Socrates.

Socrates. No doubt, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many other pious acts?

Euthyphro. There are.

Socrates. Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to be pious…

Euthyphro tries to answer Socrates but eventually gives up, unable to balance competing pieties.

Balancing is harder than leaning, as any gym rat will tell you. It takes more energy to lift free weights than machine weights. With machine weights you lean and push. With free weighs you balance and push, which is harder.

Easiest of all is leaning into Euthyphro’s “doing what I’m doing” and calling it pure piety, scorning others for tainting things by trying to find balance weighing relative merits.

In my lifetime there has never been more of this immoral relativism in public discourse than there is now. It is a worrying sign.

My ex-partner is a sociopath. No really. I hope you believe me. But then I also hope you doubt me too.

A sociopath has little or no conscience, and "the little" in that definition is a very big problem. How little is little enough to warrant the diagnosis of sociopathy?

Conscience is expensive. To be entirely conscientious would be impossible for any of us, manifesting as constant effort on behalf of others and constant guilt, shame, and remorse for not being able to do enough. We all therefore allocate our finite conscientiousness, usually with lots for our closest loved ones and less or none for the people far away.

Having too little conscience is measured relative to circumstances. “How can people be so callous?” says an upper class American when reading about middle-class people in Bombay who ignore thousands of beggars a day. In contrast, that American living in a gated community, providing generously to her family and wealthy neighbors demonstrates ample conscience for her circumstances. The more strife; the more compassion is called for. If the economy collapses and the climate crisis causes orders of magnitude more “acts of God,” do we all become instant sociopaths for showing too little compassion relative to the growing desperation that surrounds us?

And then there’s the question of where we allocate our conscientious effort and empathy. Hotel Heiress Leona Helmsley left $12 million to her pet dog. Many would say she was a sociopath. Yet she did show more than a little conscience in her concern for her dog’s well being.

When we diagnose the people who hurt, jilted or “used” us, calling them narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, or just cold-hearted, maybe we’re really just disappointed that they turned their conscientiousness away from us. Are people uncaring when they don’t care for us as much as they care for someone nhhhhew?

There’s a vulgar riddle at men’s expense that speaks to disciplining our diagnoses:

Q: What’s the difference between a b**tch and a w**re?

A: A w**re will have sex with anyone but a b**tch will have sex with anyone but you.

To which I’d add:

Q: What’s the difference between a sociopath and a frustrating ex?

A: A sociopath doesn’t care about anyone and a frustrating ex- doesn’t care about you.

And further:

Q: What’s the difference between a narcissist and a frustrating ex?

A: A narcissist loves himself more than anyone and a frustrating ex- loves himself more than he loves you.

These highlight one of the reasons that many frustrated ex-partners diagnose their former intimates in such clinically severe terms.

But another reason is that some people really are narcissists and sociopaths and with them, not calling a spade a spade is the most dangerous thing you can do.

“Should I trust here?” is about the hardest question we ever face. What we do when we trust and don’t trust are exact opposites so you can’t really hedge. The only thing worse that not trusting the trustworthy, is trusting the untrustworthy.

With most people we can go case by case. We might trust our good friends mostly but perhaps not on everything. Think of a sociopath as someone who can send convincing signals to trust always when in fact he or she can never ever be trusted—a con artist with no potential for remorse--very scary, very important to recognize before he or she plays your heartstrings and cuts out your heart.

For a fine, thought-proving and entertaining book on the benefits and costs of diagnosing and misdiagnosing psychopaths (a term synonymous with sociopaths), read the current NYT best seller “The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ranson. For a masterpiece of psychological reasoning and deep analysis of the challenge of dealing with sociopaths, read Martha Stout’s “The Sociopath Next Door.” Here are three

I'm entitled to do what you, in my same circumstances would not be entitled to do--that's a double standard. Being civilized means trying to constrain the natural human tendency toward such double standards.

The tendency toward double standards doesn't originate with humans. It is as old as life itself. All organisms demonstrate autonomous agency. A bird, unlike a rock, looks out for herself and hers. A tree without even a nervous system competes for sunlight.

We humans have got life’s autonomous agency plus nervous systems, a major double standard augmenter. We really feel our personal pain, much more so than we feel the pain of others. We are compelled by the neuron’s persuasive and convincing power to look out for ourselves, at the expense of others.

Add to this another double-standard augmenter. Language the inventive power to give voice to our individual desires and to rationalize them. Language reliably grants me an explanation, however specious for why I personally deserve what you, in my situation would not deserve. “Ah, but don’t you see,” I say “if you were in my circumstances it would be completely different…” And then I invent a reason why it would be.

Civilization’s great inventions have been constraints on double standards. “Rule by law” for example is a double standard diminisher, moving us away from “rule by man” whereby a lord, supposedly chosen by God gets to impose his double standards. That all of us are in theory “equal under the law” is a significant check on our natural selfishness and double standards. “Rule by law” also moves us away from a variation on “rule by man” whereby a Lord in Heaven defined by some Great Man of Faith exercises that man’s double standard. A pope saying “God says that I’m exceptional,” for example.

Double standard exceptionalism starts at home with “I demand more,” but really takes off when extended to a tribal “We demand more.” For example, “God loves us,” instead of merely “God loves me.”

Is extending our double standards to an “exclusive we” a double standard augmenter or diminisher? One the one hand charity begins at home, so extending the standard to our next of kin and tribal neighbors is exactly how you would expect the diminishment of double standards to start. Rule of Law, that great double standard diminisher grow by gradual extention ,first for example in the Magna Carta from kings to nobles.

On the other hand, extending the double standard from “I demand more” to “We demand more” is probably more of a double standard enhancer than diminisher. The delimited altruism of the extended double standard liberates me to promote my double standard without fear that I’m being selfish. To the outside world the tribe member says, “Yes I’m claiming I deserve more than you do, but notice how selfless I am in also claiming my family and tribe members deserve more than you deserve.”

Historically the extended double standard “We demand more” idea has unleashed both the great movements--national independence, civil rights, women’s rights, workers rights--and the horrible movements—national exceptionalism, racial supremacy, tribal bullying and bigotry of all sorts. Righteous indignation on behalf of “us” feels righteous because in some cases it is, for example when beating back the encroachment of exceptionalists who succeeded in imposing their extended double-standard and crowding others out, the way men did with women for millennia, and Nazis did with Jews and then Jews do with Palestinians today Women, Jews and Palestinians in their time of oppression are righteous for demanding more for their tribe. Their oppressors in their time think they are being righteous when demanding more for their tribe. But they’re wrong. It is the added power of extended dou