Peace to the suffering.
There is a thing alive within us and it’s moving. It’s us, but it’s not us. It controls us. It controls our minds. It moves us toward its dark purposes.
It controls us by controlling our minds, it controls how we think and perceive, and how we think and perceive controls how we respond.
It’s a pathogen. It creates pathology. It makes us insane with pathological hatred and pathological violence. It’s alive and it’s moving within us to its dark purposes.
Dark Personalities
Research into our personalities, into who we are, has identified three dark personalities, particularly malevolent personality pathology – the core of evil, 1) the Dark Triad, 2) the Vulnerable Dark Triad, and 3) the Dark Tetrad.
From Giammarco & Vernon: “First cited by Paulhus and Williams (2002), the Dark Triad refers to a set of three distinct but related antisocial personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Each of the Dark Triad traits is associated with feelings of superiority and privilege. This, coupled with a lack of remorse and empathy, often leads individuals high in these socially malevolent traits to exploit others for their own personal gain.” (Giammarco & Vernon, 2014, p. 23)[1]
Dark Triad: narcissism, psychopathic, Machiavellian manipulation
Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The dark triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36, 556–563.
Vulnerable Dark Triad: vulnerable narcissism, borderline, Machiavellian manipulation.
Miller, J.D., Dir, A., Gentile, B., Wilson, L., Pryor, L.R., and Campbell, W.K. (2010). Searching for a Vulnerable Dark Triad: Comparing Factor 2 psychopathy, vulnerable narcissism, and borderline personality disorder. Journal of Personality, 78, 1529-1564.
Dark Tetrad: add sadism to the Dark Triad
Book, A., Visser, B.A., Blais, J., Hosker-Field, A., and Methot-Jones, T. (2016). Unpacking more “evil”: What is at the core of the dark tetrad? Personality and Individual Differences, 90, 269-272.
This is the most dangerous pathogen on the planet. It is a specific set of damaged information structures in the attachment networks. This damaged set of attachment structures makes us do things, horrible things. It makes us insane with pathological hatred, it controls our minds and motivates our pathological violence.
It’s a mind-virus and it’s highly contagious. It generates a collective insanity as we descend into our own self-destruction in the pathological violence and pathological cruelty the mind-virus creates in us. It is sadistic.
Our suffering gratifies it – creating our suffering feels good to the thing within our minds – “They deserve to suffer.” Who they are depends on the mind.
Us & Them
There’s “Us” – the chosen of God. There’s “Them” the Evil outside – our Shadow.
The specific contents of who’s Us and who’s Them changes, but the structures created by the pathological mind are always the same – they “deserve” to suffer. It wants to create our suffering, our suffering makes it feel good – it gratifies its hunger and quenches its pain… for the moment.
Then it must feed again… on us.
It’s not Hamas. It’s not Al-Queda. It’s not the Irish Republican Army. It’s not a gunman in our schools killing our children. It’s a pathogen in our minds that creates a pathology, an insanity of pathological hatred and pathological violence. It’s a coherent set of damaged information structures in our attachment networks.
The pathogen is damage. The damage is in a specific set of information structures in the attachment networks, the love-and-bonding system of the brain.
It was damaged by trauma. The pathogen is the creation of trauma. Trauma is its source, its birthplace, and when it grows to maturity it then re-creates the trauma that it knows… it replicates itself in other minds.
It wants to be healed. It wants to be destroyed. Will we heal it or will it destroy itself in us, in our own motivated self-destruction? Will we go insane, or will we recover our sanity from the mind-virus within?
World War I – World War II – World War III
World War III is upon us. This time, this final World War is not one with ourselves on the outside, we are in a Worldwide War with ourselves on the inside. The enemy is Us not Them. It’s within us, it surrounds us.
How do we fight a war against us? What happens when the Enemy is not out there?
There is a pathogen in our minds. But we cannot extract it because it hides exceptionally well. It’s our neighbors, our co-workers, it’s everyone around us… including us.
It’s a mind-virus. It spreads from brain to brain. You’ve been infected. It lives in your mind too. It may be dormant now, but under the right circumstances of activation, the pathogen of pathological violence can find us all. We are surrounded by our traumas, traumas we don’t see because it’s us.
We think it’s normal.
This is the most dangerous pathogen on the planet. There is no vaccine, there is no treatment. It is lethal. It will kill us as it kills itself. It is self-destructive, it wants to be healed. It is sadistic.
When the mind-virus of pathological hatred and pathological violence captures a collective of individual minds, there’s no cure for the outbreak of the violent pathology. The only solution is to surgically remove the infected minds from existence among us.
The only cure for the pathogen of small pox is the complete eradication of the virus from the planet. As long as the pathogen is among us, it will infect us and kill us. It is everywhere among us. We must keep the outbreaks under control while not killing the patient with the cure.
The mind-infection is in all of us. It’s the trauma of our world that’s rippling into our world from times before. We pass the mind-virus from generation to generation, a little less intense with each generational iteration. We are slowly – too slowly – healing.
We are in a race now. Will we heal the pathogen within us, or will the pathogen within us kill us?
We can’t eradicate the mind-virus within us. If we kill the individual minds that are inflamed, the pathogen – Hamas – will simply recruit new damaged minds to itself – it hides extremely well and it seeks allies. It seeks, it locates itself in their brains and triggers them to join the collective of madness – to join the pathological hatreds that will lead to the pathological violence.
Seeking to kill Hamas is impossible, the Terrorist Mind will simply recruit more from the multitude of vulnerable minds made vulnerable by our collective traumas.
Seeking to kill Hamas in Gaza only creates more trauma in Gaza, and trauma is the incubator for the pathogen. It’s creating its spawn source, using its control of our minds. The virus is replicating itself in our minds.
World War III has begun. This is the final War – the war to end all wars or all humanity. It’s our choice. Or is it?
Healing & Recovery
We are in a worldwide war with ourselves, with the Terrorist Mind of pathological hatred and pathological violence that lives within us, a pathogen that is us but is not us.
It’s sadistic, our suffering brings it feelings of gratification – our suffering feels good to the pathogen. It gratifies a need – a hunger.
It wants us to heal it. It wants to destroy itself… and it is us.
There is a thing that’s alive within us and it’s moving toward its purposes – dark and destructive purposes. Will we be able to heal the damage within our minds, or will we descend into our madness as our damage leads us to our own self-destruction as it destroys itself?
Peace to the suffering of Israel. Peace to the suffering of Gaza. Peace to the suffering of us all.
There are other ways to transform suffering without transforming suffering into more suffering endlessly repeated. There are the better angels of our nature when we ask for our better nature… but we must ask for our better nature for them to come.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” – Abraham Lincoln
May we find the better angels within us when we are again touched, as surely we will be, with the remembrance that we are not enemies, we are family, we are friends.
Peace to suffering.
Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, CA PSY 18857
The Terrorist Mind: Pathological Anger and Pathological Violence 