Buddhism and the Dark Triad/Tetrad

Have done a bit of reading about the Dark Tetrad. This seems like a very important classification in psychology because it identifies the key qualities surrounding what has been broadly called before Evil.

It is the battle against Evil which is at the centre of Human Life. Enlightenment more than anything is the defeat of Evil. Traditional stories of Evil include the creation of suffering through evil acts and the entering of Hell for those who become controlled by Evil. Both these remain sensible. The nature of Evil (and of the Dark Tetrad) is isolation and this is the opposite of our True Nature which is universal, total and unified. The obvious proof of this lies in examining what barriers really exist between people, and of what those barriers might be made of?

It is fascinating to me that the qualities of the Dark Tetrad include misunderstanding of True Nature.

The Narcissist is actually a paper thin version of a Buddha. It is appealing to our Narcissistic tendencies to feel we are a Buddha - superior, complete, indestructable, perfect, universal. The irony of course is that we are almost perfectly the opposite. When we face their own death and the humiliation and shame of sickness and old age like Buddha we will quickly realise we have only achieved a shell from reality: one that must be broken before even starting on the path to Buddhahood. Shame and humiliation is the key to the Narcissist but also the path to Enlightenment: the totally crushing realisation that we do not stand alone but are made by our parents and the universe around us and we cannot exist without other people and the world.

The Machiavellian which I cannot relate to at all, must be very stupid. For them life and other people is a game to be won. But they measure the winning only upon their own status. Thus a win-win is of less value than a win-lose because the latter enables them to defeat the enemy, while a win-win strengthens the enemy. But when we realise like above that we did not make ourselves, we have arrived mysteriously upon this planet by forces other than ourselves: our parents, the health care workers, teachers, farmers and everyone who has made and supported us and actually there is nothing about us that will survive death the idea of "winning for myself" appears ludicrous. We are the fool, and the irony is that our chosen target in the game like money, or sex, respect or whatever is only ever increased at the expense of everything else we don't measure. Like economics that while the money and wealth may increase the environment is destroyed and we are ultimately the poorer. The devil is very good at using fake goals to tempt us to the pit of destruction.

The Psychopath I can identify with because for my whole life I have seen feeling as useless. It is a primitive part of the brain and a vestige of our animal past. It makes us weak because people can emotionally blackmail us, and we are vulnerable to animal instincts. Like the little mermaid accepting feelings also means we have to accept pain so is it worth it? (This is all a wrong view btw). I neither want to feel in myself nor feel in others. The rational by contrast is the pure, it is universal, it is the correct. the Vulcans of Star Trek embody this view. Indeed Buddha as desireless and indifferent seems like a cool Psychopath at first look. But there is a problem with the real Psychopath actually they are not entirely honest with themselves. They do have feelings but "only for themselves". So the psychopath will get angry, and they will want love, and they will get hurt so they are firstly dishonest - feelings are centre in their life. Now they say that there are genes that make people into psychopaths so that they have no mirror neurons and they actually cannot feel what other people feel. They end up faking interactions with other people their whole lives so they can fit in, and they know its a fake. They are like blind people but it is others feelings they cannot see rather than their faces. But does this make them Evil? Like a blind person it means that life is different, and living with sighted people is difficult because sighted people themselves tend to not understand blind people. But inside they are not Evil. A psychopath will want to help themselves when they suffer. Thus a psychopath once they discover suffering in another (harder because of their blindness) will want to help another. Suffering is after all something we seek to tackle. Compassion is not affected by psychopathy. I read that empathy is something we learn and get better at as we get older. Looking at children there is a huge range in the development of empathy but at the start kids have none. Obviously developing empathy is a much bigger mountain for a psychopath with their partial/total blindness. The brain is plastic and changes as we learn. Can a psychopath learn to grow mirror neurons, and is the lack of mirror neurons simply a result of them not exercising empathy? And genetics can only give us the tools, it doesn't dictate whether or how we use them. My genes give me hands, they don't dictate whether I use them for good or evil. Evidence of epigenetics exists also so that "we" can even turn genes on and off! Genes are not the point. So what is the psychopath's real problem? I suspect they are more likely to end up as criminals because they are not encouraged by their peers to think about other people. They need to do this a lot to overcome their weakness. A physically weak person may want to visit the gym to develop their muscles, so it is with the Psychopath but it is the much more useful feelings they are need to develop, experience and understand rather than just the physical (for which we can hire body guards and machines). Any negativity, shyness, sensitivity to pain, hatred is going to send a person with psychopathic tendency in the same protective shell as the narcissist. Being cut off from the world around once again is the Hell to be avoided. When this shut in Hell gets out, that is when other people around suffer also.

Finally the Sadistic. I had an experience of Schadenfreude for the first time recently. It is a very strange occurrence because rationally you know there is simply no reason for this. How can someone else's misfortune possibly achieve anything good in the Real World. But if I look more deeply I had a grievance against the person so their misfortune was like payback and I realised I had harboured a dislike and hatred of them for ages. But the misfortune was way in excess of any negative feelings I had, it was nasty. So where does the pleasure or satisfaction in being nasty come from? The projection of negativity? Lets try the universal test of goodness: Would I be nasty to myself and enjoy it? Most likely I would end up hating myself as I do people who are nasty to me, so I would both hate myself and enjoy it. Perhaps hating myself is itself a form of nastiness so I could get caught in a loop or hating myself, enjoying that, but then hating myself more for being so nasty to myself. Normally we do this via projection to hide ourself (as being both the victim and the perpetrator contradicts the belief there is only one of us and spoils the fun of the perpetrator and the anguish of the victim) so we find the outside world nasty and hate that instead, even while all the badness is actually our own choices. So actually sadism to the self causes a contradiction that splits the self. The key to this is that with Sadism the belief is that the victim and the perpetrator are separate. Here we go again, the apparent pleasure is at the expense of being alone and in isolation. Like all the above. And why would we give away the negativity if we liked the negativity? We push negativity and hatred onto others precisely because we don't like it. I saw Slavoj Zizek recently trying to argue that people like suffering. Worth noting that man himself is overrun with suffering. I think perhaps when we cannot overcome our suffering we try and save face and pretend we like it. To suffer appears like failure, so better to say like it. But we lie to ourselves: our every thoughts and action is ultimately to be free from displeasure, discomfort and dis-ease. We can give positivity to others and see them flourish. But when we give negativity they whither. When we have negativity we whither. Negativity is suffering, we don't want it, but we take command of it by giving it to others which gives us apparent relief from our own suffering. But it is a fake, cos we haven't mastered the horrible negativity at all and in fact make it worse by becoming isolated. Our victim is actually the winner because while they may suffer at our inflicted negativity we must give them it for them to suffer. It is ours, and we cannot escape that. We are the loser. Any Machiavellian instinct should fight the sadistic instinct to win over our negativity! The devil once again gives us a fake goal to lead us into the pit of isolation and desolation.

So all this points directly at Buddha's teachings which are much simpler and less infected with materialism and empirical evidence than the psychological world, which is flailing around thousands of years after the subcontinent clearly wrote it all down. The key point is Anatta and the illusion of self. All things are non-self : that includes other people, but also everything is in our own heads! It is ALL not-self. The mistake in the Dark Tetrad is that we can attach to things like feelings and thought and believe they "belong" to a mythical self which we have never even seen! As greater fantasy even than Father Christmas but one propagated unquestioningly by Western culture. Actually there is nothing to separate people, or things - there is just One World with everything side by side. The One World is both composed of individual (Democritus) and the complex interaction and unity from which those individuals emerge (Parmenides) "we are all individuals" - where there are individuals there is also necessarily a group! The ultimately irony of that is usually missed by much of the Monty Python community who uses it only as a criticism of group thinking. So the Dark Tetrad are the collection of mental processes that have deep effects on our body and brains that lead us into isolation - which is the diametric opposite of the truth and the darkest of the Hells. It is the new word for what was called the Devil. The cure is to reject the Devil which is the same as to reject these thought process - tho we may not realise how dangerous they are until damage is done. The goal is to seek integration with the world and other people, and to challenge our negativity when we find it and ultimately to turn energy that is negativity around into positive.

For the Narcissistic tendency we accept shame, and those who humiliate us and show us as mundane we can thank for breaking the shell. Even Superman loses his power when he falls in love - and love and the abandoning of the cold isolation of the Fortress of Solitude makes us ultimately stronger and more truthful! For the Machiavellian tendency we replace loss with giving, and thank those takers for breaking the shell. For the Psychopath tendency we allow the full experience of painful feelings and gradually seek to observe that everyone must have them equally - they don't belong to us. For those who hurt us we can thank for breaking the shell. For the Sadistic tendency we take all the negativity in ourselves and the world and we seek to make it good - however doing this gently, as we will exhaust ourselves if we do more than a step at a time. We don't need to die on a cross, we may even accept Him who did that, if it is our path. For all those we have negative feelings toward and who inspire nastiness we can thank for making us aware of the things we must make positive. When we fail we can use that shame and humiliation to check our Narcissism.

Ok I didn't think this through too well, I'm no expert, and as with everything else on this blog its just a regurgitation of current thought processes.