Adventures With Cassiopaea

Chapter 31

In 1950, Nash was hired as a consultant for RAND Corporation, a secretive civilian think tank funded by the Air Force. This was where the big brains worked out problems of nuclear war and Game Theory. The RAND ideal was a militarized worship of the rational life, geopolitical obsession, paranoia and megalomania. Its mission was to apply rational analysis and the latest quantitative methods to the problem of how to use nuclear weapons most effectively - as instruments of destruction, or deterrence. Nasar suggests that RAND may have been the model for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series about hyper-rational social scientists, or psycho-historians - who think it is their job to save the galaxy from chaos.

Nash was initiated into the secret world of RAND along with a host of other mathematicians. After World War II, many of the mathematicians and scientists recruited for the war continued to be employed by military research organizations. And, of all the ideas that had come along during the war, Game Theory was seen as the most sophisticated tool. RAND was privy to the military's most highly guarded secrets.

Nash stood out as the oddest of the bunch at RAND. It seems that, on a number of occasions, the maintenance crew reported that Nash was observed to be "tiptoeing exaggeratedly along the avenue, stalking flocks of pigeons, and then suddenly rushing forward to try to kick them."

Sounds like a real swell guy. Early cruelty to animals is almost a dead giveaway to the psychopathic personality. When they become adults, they may even tell others about their childhood cruelty as an "ordinary event" of growing up. They will describe it as having been "enjoyable," and they possibly assume that it is a common feature of maturation. The fact that Nash continued to regard living creatures as something to stalk and hurt is seriously disturbing.

In 1954, Nash was arrested in Palisades Park. He was charged with indecent exposure. Richard Best, RAND's security manager was informed of the arrest and was reported to have said that what happened was that Nash went into a public restroom, came on to another man by taking out his penis and masturbating. The only problem was, it was a cop.

Nash had a top secret security clearance. The security guidelines forbade anyone suspected of homosexual activity to hold a security clearance because, at the time, vulnerability to black mail was an issue. Aside from that, the reckless nature of Nash's act indicated poor judgment. When Best confronted Nash with the news that his security clearance was being canceled, that he would have to go right then - that very minute - Nash was neither shaken nor embarrassed. Another sign of the psychopath. They don't have feelings, so they can never be embarrassed!

Nash didn't take it all that hard. He denied that he had been trying to pick up the cop and tended to scoff at the notion that he could be a homosexual. "I'm not a homosexual," Best quotes Nash as saying. "I like women." He then did something that puzzled Best and shocked him a little. "He pulled a picture out of his wallet and showed us a picture of a woman and a little boy. 'Here's the woman I'm going to marry and our son.'"

Best ignored the obvious psychopathic ploy and asked Nash for his version of the "event." Nash kept repeating that he was "merely observing behavioral characteristics." Yeah, right. That and a buck will get you a cup of coffee!

Sylvia Nasar writes about the incident asking questions about Nash's possible internal reaction to this event. She asks:

"What was going through Nash's mind in that interval? Was he angry? Depressed? Frightened? […] Did he try to have RAND's decision reversed? Generally, of course people did not. Fearful of scandal and aware of the contempt with which any hint of homosexuality was viewed, people in Nash's shoes were usually only too happy to slink away without murmur or protest.

In the end, Nash did what he had learned to do in less extreme circumstances. He acted, weirdly, as if nothing had happened. He played the observer of his own drama, as if it were all a game or some intriguing experiment in human behavior, focusing neither on the emotions of people around him nor on his own, but on moves and countermoves. […] At some point he told his parents he'd had trouble with his RAND security clearance, blaming it on the fact that his mentor at MIT, Norman Levinson, was a former communist who had been hauled before HUAC that year. [Nasar]

A more typical description of the behavior and actions of a psychopath could hardly be imagined. But Nasar, like the rest of us, sought answers to Nash's behavior by assuming that he was like other people. She wondered about him being afraid of scandal or contempt. She just didn't get it that Nash did not have a conscience. Those things simply were not part of his make-up.

Conscience seems to depend on the ability to imagine consequences. But most "consequences" relate to pain in some way, and psychopaths really don't understand pain in the emotional sense. They understand frustration of not getting what they want, and to them, that is pain. But the fact seems to be that they act based solely on a sort of Game Theory evaluation of a situation: what will they get out of it, and what will it cost? And these "costs" have nothing to do with being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging the future, or any of the other possibilities that normal people consider when making a choice. In short, it is almost impossible for normal people to even imagine the inner life of the psychopath.

This leads us to what psychopaths DO have that is truly outstanding: an ability to give their undivided attention to something that interests them intensely. Some clinicians have compared this to the concentration with which a predator stalks his prey. This is useful if one is in an environment with few variables, but most real life situations require us to pay attention to a number of things at once. Psychopaths often pay so much attention to getting what they want that they fail to notice danger signals.

For example, some psychopaths earned reputations for being fearless fighter pilots during World War II, staying on their targets like terriers on an ankle. Yet, these pilots often failed to keep track of such unexciting details as fuel supply, altitude, location, and the position of other planes. Sometimes they became heroes, but more often, they were killed or became known as opportunists, loners, or hotshots who couldn't be relied on - except to take care of themselves. [Hare]

Nash demonstrated this quality to an extreme degree in the field of mathematics. However, Nash wasn't interested in mathematics for the sake of mathematics itself - the problem had to be important in the opinion of others, and thereby likely to garner attention and glory to himself. Nash wouldn't work on a problem unless he was assured that it was sufficiently important to "deserve" his attention. But, once he had decided, his "attention" was prodigious.

His tolerance for solitude, great confidence in his own intuition, indifference to criticism - all detectable at a young age but now prominent and impermeable features of his personality - served him well. […] The most eloquent description of Nash's single-minded attack on the problem comes from Moser:

The difficulty [that Levinson had pointed out], to anyone in his right mind, would have stopped them cold and caused them to abandon the problem. But Nash was different. If he had a hunch, conventional criticisms didn't stop him. He had no background knowledge. It was totally uncanny. Nobody could understand how somebody like that could do it. He was the only person I ever saw with that kind of power, just brute mental power. [Moser quoted by Nasar]

Again, it should be emphasized that psychopaths are interesting as all get out - even exciting! They exude a captivating energy that keeps their listeners on the edge of their seats. Even if some part of the normal person is shocked or repelled by what the psychopath says, they are like the mouse hypnotized by the torturing cat. Even if they have the chance to run away, they don't. Many Psychopaths "make their living" by using charm, deceit, and manipulation to gain the confidence of their victims. Many of them can be found in white collar professions where they are aided in their evil by the fact that most people expect certain classes of people to be trustworthy because of their social or professional credentials. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, politicians, psychiatrists and psychologists, generally do not have to earn our trust because they have it by virtue of their positions. But the fact is: psychopaths are found in such lofty spheres also!

At the same time, psychopaths are good imposters. They have absolutely no hesitation about forging and brazenly using impressive credentials to adopt professional roles that bring prestige and power. They pick professions in which the requisite skills are easy to fake, the jargon is easy to learn, and the credentials are unlikely to be thoroughly checked. Psychopaths find it extremely easy to pose as financial consultants, ministers, psychological counselors and psychologists. And that's a scary thought.

Psychopaths make their way by conning people into doing things for them; obtaining money for them, prestige, power, or even standing up for them when others try to expose them. But that is their claim to fame. That's what they do. And they do it very well. What's more, the job is very easy because most people are gullible with an unshakable belief in the inherent goodness of man.

Manipulation is the key to the psychopath's conquests. Initially, the psychopath will feign false emotions to create empathy, and many of them study the tricks that can be employed by the empathy technique. Psychopaths are often able to incite pity from people because they seem like "lost souls" as Guggenbuhl-Craig writes. So the pity factor is one reason why victims often fall for these "poor" people.

Hare cites a famous case where a psychopath was "Man of the Year" and president of the Chamber of Commerce in his small town. (Remember that John Wayne Gacy was running for Jaycee President at the very time of his first murder conviction!) The man in question had claimed to have a Ph.D. from Berkeley. He ran for a position on the school board which he then planned to parlay into a position on the county commission which paid more.

At some point, a local reporter suddenly had the idea to check up on the guy - to see if his credentials were real. What the reporter found out was that the only thing that was true about this up and coming politician's "faked bio" was the place and date of birth. Everything else was fictitious. Not only was the man a complete impostor, he had a long history of antisocial behavior, fraud, impersonation, and imprisonment. His only contact with a university was a series of extension courses by mail that he took while in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. What is even more amazing is the fact that before he was a con-man, he was a "con-boy." For two decades he had dodged his way across America one step ahead of those he had hoodwinked. Along the way he had married three women and had four children, and he didn't even know what had happened to them. And now, he was on a roll! But darn that pesky reporter!

When he was exposed, he was completely unconcerned. "These trusting people will stand behind me. A good liar is a good judge of people," he said. Amazingly, he was right. Far from being outraged at the fact that they had all been completely deceived and lied to from top to bottom, the local community he had conned so completely to accrue benefits and honors to himself that he had not earned, rushed to his support!

I kid you not! And it wasn't just "token support." The local Republican party chairman wrote about him: "I assess his genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln." As Hare dryly notes, this dimwit was easily swayed by words, and was blind to deeds.

We understand this phenomenon from direct personal experience. The above case is almost an item by item mirror of our interaction with Maynerd Most. After questions were raised about his credentials, side by side with our observation of his many activities consisting of vociferously blaming the victims (us) for refusing to be further victimized, we became acutely aware of his capacity for lying. It was, in fact, his publicly posted lies that we, and many others, who had been witnesses to things that Maynerd Most (and others in his gang as well) was clearly and obviously lying about that clued us in to his true nature. Had he behaved otherwise, he would be well on his way to more and better con-jobs with our blessings, given out of ignorance. However, by noting the nature of his written discourses, the endless lies stacked on lies, naturally led to the idea that maybe everything he says is a lie, including his credentials. This observation turned out to be correct, but it didn't seem to matter. Surprisingly, (to us, at least) there was no lack of people who were willing to compare Most to Abraham Lincoln because of his "genuineness, integrity, and devotion to duty." And that factor, of course, is what contributes to the success of the psychopath.

We observed this for some months, shaking our head in wonder at how many people seem to WANT to be duped, to be made fools of, and that is partly why we undertook to study the phenomenon more deeply. We wanted to know what kind of psychological weaknesses drive people to prefer lies over truth.

This may have something to do with what is called Cognitive Dissonance. Leon Festinger developed the theory of Cognitive Dissonance in the 50's when he apparently stumbled onto a UFO cult in the Midwest. They were prophesying a coming world cataclysm and "alien rapture." When no one was raptured and no cataclysm he studied the believers response, and detailed it in his book "When Prophecy Fails." Festinger observed:

A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.

We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks.

But man's resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.

It seems that part of the problem has to do with ego and the need to be "right." People with a high "need to be right" or "perfect" seem to be unable to acknowledge that they have been conned. "There is no crime in the cynical American calendar more humiliating than to be a sucker." People will go along with and support a psychopath, in the face of evidence that they have and ARE being conned, because their own ego structure depends on being right, and to admit an error of judgment would destroy their carefully constructed image of themselves.

Even more amazing is the fact that when psychopaths do get exposed by someone who is not afraid to admit that they have been conned, the psychopath is a master at painting their victims as the "real culprits." We have experienced this first hand also with both Frank Scott and Maynerd Most, as well as others, as will be seen further along. And we were, indeed, interested to discover that we weren't the only ones. Hare cites a case of the third wife of a forty year old high school teacher:

For five years he cheated on me, kept me living in fear, and forged checks on my personal bank account. But everyone, including my doctor and lawyer and my friends, blamed me for the problem. He had them so convinced that he was a great guy and that I was going mad, I began to believe it myself. Even when he cleaned out my bank account and ran off with a seventeen-year-old student, a lot of people couldn't believe it, and some wanted to know what I had done to make him act so strangely!

Psychopaths just have what it takes to defraud and bilk others: they can be fast talkers, they can be charming, they can be self-assured and at ease in social situations; they are cool under pressure, unfazed by the possibility of being found out, and totally ruthless. And even when they are exposed, they can carry on as if nothing has happened, often making their accusers the targets of accusations of being victimized by THEM.

I was once dumbfounded by the logic of an inmate who described his murder victim as having benefited from the crime by learning "a hard lesson about life." [Hare]

The victims keep asking: "How could I have been so stupid? How could I have fallen for that incredible line of baloney?" And, of course, if they don't ask it of themselves, you can be sure that their friends and associates will ask "How on earth could you have been taken in to that extent?"

The usual answer: "You had to be there" simply does not convey the whole thing. Hare writes:

What makes psychopaths different from all others is the remarkable ease with which they lie, the pervasiveness of their deception, and the callousness with which they carry it out.

But there is something else about the speech of psychopaths that is equally puzzling: their frequent use of contradictory and logically inconsistent statements that usually escape detection. Recent research on the language of psychopaths provides us with some important clues to this puzzle, as well as to the uncanny ability psychopaths have to move words - and people- around so easily. […]

Here are some examples:

When asked if he had ever committed a violent offense, a man serving time for theft answered, "No, but I once had to kill someone."

A woman with a staggering record of fraud, deceit, lies, and broken promises concluded a letter to the parole board with, "I've let a lot of people down… One is only as good as her reputation and name. My word is as good as gold."

A man serving a term for armed robbery replied to the testimony of an eyewitness, "He's lying. I wasn't there. I should have blown his fucking head off."

From an interview with serial killer Elmer Wayne Henley:

Interviewer: "You make it out that you're the victim of a serial killer, but if you look at the record you're a serial killer."
Henley: "I'm not."
I: "You're not a serial killer?"
H: "I'm not a serial killer."
I: You're saying you're not a serial killer now, but you've serially killed."
H: "Well, yeah, that's semantics."

And so on. The point that the researchers noted was that psychopaths seem to have trouble monitoring their own speech. What is more, they often put things together in strange ways, such as this series of remarks from serial killer Clifford Olson: "And then I had annual sex with her." "Once a year?" "No. Annual. From behind." "Oh. But she was dead!" "No, no. She was just unconscientious." About his many experiences, Olson said, "I've got enough antidotes to fill five or six books - enough for a trilogy." He was determined not to be an "escape goat" no matter what the "migrating facts." [Hare]

Those of us who have had experiences with psychopaths know that the language of the psychopath is two-dimensional. They are, as someone once said, as "deep as a thimble." An analogy is given of the psychopath as a color blind person who has learned how to function in the world of color by special strategies. They may tell you that they "stopped at a red light," but what it really means to them is that they knew that the light at the top means "stop," and they stopped. They call it the "red" light like everyone else, but they have no experience of what "red" really is.

A person who is color blind who has developed such coping mechanisms, is virtually undetectable from people who see colors. I was shocked when my brother told me, when we were in our thirties, that he had been refused certain flight related training in the Navy because he was color blind. All I could think of was the many model cars he assembled when we were kids, and which he carefully selected the colors to paint them, and all the while, when he was saying to me: "isn't that a pretty red?" he had NO idea what red really was. It was only in the Navy, when the tests were administered, that even HE learned that he was color blind. And he still doesn't know what red is, though we have discussed endlessly his perceptions of color.

Continue to page 277

The owners and publishers of these pages wish to state that the material presented here is the product of our research and experimentation in Superluminal Communication. We invite the reader to share in our seeking of Truth by reading with an Open, but skeptical mind. We do not encourage "devotee-ism" nor "True Belief." We DO encourage the seeking of Knowledge and Awareness in all fields of endeavor as the best way to be able to discern lies from truth. The one thing we can tell the reader is this: we work very hard, many hours a day, and have done so for many years, to discover the "bottom line" of our existence on Earth. It is our vocation, our quest, our job. We constantly seek to validate and/or refine what we understand to be either possible or probable or both. We do this in the sincere hope that all of mankind will benefit, if not now, then at some point in one of our probable futures.

Contact Webmaster at cassiopaea.com
Copyright © 1997-2009 Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk. All rights reserved. "Cassiopaea, Cassiopaean, Cassiopaeans," is a registered trademark of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk.
Letters addressed to Cassiopaea, Quantum Future School, Ark or Laura, become the property of Arkadiusz Jadczyk and Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Republication and re-dissemination of the contents of this screen or any portion of this website in any manner is expressly prohibited without prior written consent.

You are visitor number [an error occurred while processing this directive] .