Adventures With Cassiopaea

Chapter 35

It is truly difficult to appreciate just how different the functioning of the psychopaths is compared to that of normal people. After killing a waiter who had asked him to leave a restaurant Jack Abbott denied any remorse because he "hadn't done anything wrong" because "there was no pain, it was a clean wound" and the victim was "not worth a dime." (Hare, pp. 42-3). John Wayne Gacy murdered thirty-three young men and boys, but described himself as the victim because he had been "robbed of his childhood." Kenneth Taylor battered his wife to death and then couldn't understand why no one sympathized with him in the tragic loss of his wife! A female psychopath allowed her boyfriend to rape her five-year-old daughter when she was too tired for sex, and then was outraged that social services took the child away! Diane Downs murdered her three children, then wounded herself to create "evidence" of an attack by a stranger. Asked about her feelings after the regarding the loss of her children, Downs replied "I couldn't tie my damned shoes for about two months. […] The scar is going to be there forever. […] I think my kids were lucky' (Hare, p. 53 quoted from The Oprah Winfrey Show, September 26, 1988). Hare remarks:

Another psychopath in our research said that he did not really understand what others meant by "fear". However, "When I rob a bank," he said, "I notice that the teller shakes or becomes tongue tied. One barfed all over the money. She must have been pretty messed up inside, but I don't know why. If someone pointed a gun at me I guess I'd be afraid, but I wouldn't throw up." When asked to describe how he would feel in such a situation, his reply contained no reference to bodily sensations. He said things such as, "I'd give you the money;" "I'd think of ways to get the drop on you;" "I'd try and get my ass out of there." When asked how he would feel, not what he would think or do, he seemed perplexed. Asked if he ever felt his heart pound or his stomach churn, he replied, "Of course! I'm not a robot. I really get pumped up when I have sex or when I get into a fight" (Hare, pp. 53-4).

One of the truly scary things about psychopaths is the fact that most psychotherapies actually seem to make psychopaths more likely to further violate the rights of others on even grander scales, probably because psychopaths use psychotherapy to hone their skills in psychological manipulation. In no case has it been confirmed that such therapies have ever helped a psychopath, even if they will use the fact that they have had therapy to con people, because, inside the psychopath sees no need to change their admirable personalities.

One researcher, Linda Mealey, describes psychopaths in terms of "cheaters." This suggests to us that our study of psychopaths might be helped along by considering them in terms of card sharks:

Human cheaters would not be detectable by instruments routinely available to his or her conspecifics… [and] should be very mobile during their lifetimes. The longer a cheater interacts with the same group of conspecifics the more likely they are to recognize the cheater's strategy and to refuse to engage in interactions with him or her. There will be costs of mobility, since the mobile cheater will have to learn a new social environment after a move, and he or she will need to be skilled at it. A third prediction is that human cheaters would be especially facile with words, language, and interpersonal empathy… Human male and female cheaters should exhibit very different patterns of cheating, reflecting the obligate mammalian dimorphism in reproductive strategy and potential. A male cheater should be especially skillful at persuading females to copulate and at deceiving females about his control of resources and about the likelihood of his provisioning future offspring. Females, on the other hand, should feign lack of interest in copulation in order to deceive males about their paternity confidence. They should also exaggerate need and helplessness in order to induce males to provide them with more resources and support than they might otherwise provide. Finally, female cheaters might abandon offspring as soon as they perceived that the chance of offspring survival exceeded some critical value (Harpending & Sobus, 1987, 65S-66S).

Mealey's distinguishes between congenital, or primary sociopaths who are "born cheaters," and secondary psychopaths who become "cheaters" in order to enhance their "mating and acquisition" possibilities. Her model suggests that primary psychopaths can be recognized at an early age - as toddlers - and secondary ones manifest their psychopathic nature somewhat later - possibly around the age of puberty. The primary psychopath seems to be more prevalent among well to do, well nourished, well nurtured classes, and the secondary psychopath tends to emerge from disadvantaged backgrounds.

In this sense, I think that the terms psychopath and sociopath might be useful to distinguish the two. Mealey's "secondary psychopaths," which we will refer to as sociopaths, are general of low socioeconomic status, low intelligence and poor social skills, experience parental neglect, abuse, inconsistent discipline, and punishment their antisocial behavior is a response to social pressures.

According to Mealey primary sociopaths are "designed for the successful operation of social deception and… are the product of evolutionary pressures which… lead some individuals to pursue a life strategy of manipulative and predatory social interactions' (Mealey, 1995). In short, they are designed to be the vectors of our reality. Game Theory.

However, not every indulged child becomes a psychopath, but we have to wonder at the indulgent, hothouse nurturing approach that is "prescribed" for the "special Indigo children," which is precisely designed to do precisely that.

The many people interviewed by Steven Levy generally agree that Ira was able to manipulate the emotions of others in such a way as to numb their critical faculties to the point where they were willing to believe anything he said. He was able to manipulate them to believe that he was the noble David of the Counterculture against the Goliath of "the establishment." His listeners were ready to believe anything about him that HE said, because they wanted to - even if the facts indicated the exact opposite. This emotional bond he created in his audience was not easily dissolved, and its chief effect was to rob people of their critical thinking functions. They did not want to be confused with facts, they did not want to have to think, they only wanted Ira to give voice to their own feelings of anger and resistance.

With his enormous intellect, Ira was able to pull up facts and figures about just any topic you could name or mentions, which gave an impression of infallibility. He had a talent for repeating things he had heard in such a way that the listener was led to believe that the ideas and insights were his own, that he was very clever; an intellectual, even a genius. He was a consummate "poseur." His inability to produce or "give" anything truly creative in terms of writing, was evidence that his "powers" had to do strictly with interactions wherein subtle manipulation geared toward eliciting emotional responses from his audience.

It is said that, in any room, Ira Einhorn commanded attention to himself. He would "routinely unleash a dazzling fusillade of powerful or well-known names he was in contact with, inside information he had access to, and the elevated means of understanding that he had attained. He had an odd way of twisting his apocalyptic vision so that he could speak of the world's inhabitants in the first-person plural, yet somehow be personally exempt from the category. Things are happening so fast that people don't know how to deal with the situation, he'd declaim, with the implicit understanding that Ira Einhorn himself had no difficulty comprehending the disorienting complexity of the world around him.

The very unspokenness of this superiority could make it more infuriating, because you could not put your finger on it. Ira had a way of appropriating the high ground for his opinions and attitudes, simply because they were Ira's, and by that measure correct. He would borrow your vacuum cleaner, and if you asked him, months after the loan had passed, if he might see fit to return the vacuum cleaner he would casually reply that, oh, the vacuum cleaner was broken, and change the subject. If you persisted, tried to elicit at leas some clarifying comment on the missing vacuum cleaner, he would regard you with some disappointment - you actually care about a vacuum cleaner? And you, bound in your material possessions, would shrink a little, thinking of course vacuum cleaners are but dust in the great mandala of existence. And if you resented the fact that you were out one vacuum cleaner, you kept it to yourself.

Ira Einhorn handled formal rejection in much the same spirit. It was seldom his failing, but the inadequate qualities of the rejecter that led to those problems. Once, writer William Irwin Thompson refused Einhorn permission to attend sessions at Thompson's New Age conversation pit, Lindesfarne. In fact, as Thompson recalls, "I told him he was full of shit." And what did Einhorn do? "His way was to become patronizing and condescending," Thompson recalls. "To [imply] I was a benighted person with neurotic hang-ups, a gifted person with blocks, who would never amount to much because he had all these strange blockages to the evolutionary momentum of the human race. That I was beyond salvation."

"Ira always lived as if the rules didn't apply to him, and for an extraordinary amount of time he got away with that," says Ira's friend Mike Hoffman. "He got away with it because he convinced people of his very special quality. Which he had. The intensity he put into all the reading and thinking and the willingness to go out there farther than anyone else to follow some train of thought. […] Ira really was [to himself] the center of the universe, says his friend Ralph Moore, who ran the Christian Association at Penn. "He would have an 'ends justifies the means attitude that says, 'My agenda is the legitimate one here.'

"Ira psychologically had no superego," says Stuart Samuels. "One of the reasons that his smell was so bad, despite people literally telling him about it, was that it didn't matter, because as far as he was concerned, he was larger than the world. So it didn't matter if he smelled. Ira was totally egocentric, so anything you said would always turn back on his knowledge of it, his point of view. It was always from his perspective."

"What I saw Ira do most was take over, wherever he was.," says Jeff Berner, a [friend of] Ira's. "Dominate every social scene, take over every room use every environment and ever space fully as his own. He was one of the few people I've allowed to do that in my own home. And I didn't mind because by the time he left, I was richer." Thus friends and associates accepted Ira's ego as part of a package which, on balance, was marvelously entertaining, intellectually provocative, and righteously motivated. Best of all, if you joked about it, Einhorn would be the first to laugh with you. […] He would rail about macrobiotics for half an hour, and you could, as one friend did, finally interrupt him by saying, "Great, Ira, now let's go and get a hamburger," and Ira would say, 'Sure," without missing a beat. [Levy, op. cit.]

Einhorn assiduously promoted drug use and frequent, promiscuous sex among young people. He would call for "open forums where people will listen, instead of shoving drugs under the rug." Ira passed out DMT and hash to students and friends and taught classes entitled "Analogues to the LSD experience." This maneuver was designed to create even more controversy about himself. Even though LSD was being discussed by everyone in private, Ira was the first in Philadelphia who dared to publicly proclaim Acid's "virtues." He encouraged and participated in "sexual encounters," otherwise known as orgies, and his reputation as a "cocksman" was, as we have already noted, legendary, if somewhat misleading. Ira had quantity, not quality, it seems.

Keep in mind, he began his public "ascent" in 1964-66.

Continue to page 307

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