How to Analyze People

by Paul Sharp

  Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of Ruth’s story was that her sentence could have been commuted and it was not. It is believed that about ninety percent of death sentences dealt with women during this period were forgiven, while Ruth’s was allowed to remain. Was this another part of what made Ruth such easy prey? She was a beautiful bleach blonde nightclub hostess at a time when women were supposed to be something else. She even showed up to court in her normal hairstyle and a fur coat even though she was urged not to. Perhaps it was Desmond Cussen’s desire to deal death to Ruth and Blakely both.

  The thing is, you never really know the motivations of a narcissist or dark manipulator because they are wise enough to keep these to themselves. They know how to use words to gain your trust and to make an emotional connection with you. Making an emotional bond, a bond that may even have the appearance of empathy on their part renders you easy prey to them because it allows their motivations and their emotional state to become your own, flying in the face of Adlerian ideas of individual psychological action.

  If a practitioner of dark psychology is good at what they do then they should be able to turn you into a mirror of their own emotions and desires. You are a tool that they are able to wield because they have insinuated themselves into your psyche with a device that is not too different from hypnotism. The tricks of this trade rely on basic human tendencies toward suggestion and emotional imprinting. Again, as much as is said of “human nature,” these sorts of features of us appear to be animal nature as this sort of imprinting can be seen in animals as primitive as geese as the studies of Konrad Lorenz demonstrate.

  History will never really know who Desmond Cussen was and what his motivations were. Cussen is not reported to have been angry at Ruth that she was not only seeing Blakely, but that she still cared enough about him to become pregnant by him and to stalk him, but he must have been. Ruth was just insensitive to what his real emotions and motivations were because he was such a skillful manipulator. Indeed, Desmond perhaps was so skilled that even today people doubt whether he should be associated with Ruth’s action or if she should be treated as if she acted with her own volition.

  The Aspects of Dark Psychology and Mind Control

  One of the issues with Alfred Adler’s individual psychology concept is that if human beings were not motivated by deep, primal drives then they probably would not be so susceptible to mind control. It is not difficult to see why Freudian psychoanalytical theory did not fully account for the observations of human behavior that researchers like Adler made, but it is also a pitfall to suppose that humans are motivated only by purposeful desires.

  It is important to get back here to the idea of some human behavior being purposeful while others being in the realm of what is called a singularity. Singularity is a term that is occasionally used in the field of artificial intelligence, but it has relevance in dark psychology, as well. In AI theory, singularity represents the hypothetical point at which artificially intelligent technology powered by quantum computing will exceed the collective intelligence of all human beings, representing a point of universal machine omniscience. This type of singularity represents the idea of AI having a sort of collective, intelligent identity and motivations that are particularly human.

  Singularity in dark psychology suggests tapping into a collective narcissistic energy that perhaps represents a “dark” or primitive side of human nature. The implication here is that human beings are possessed by qualities and motivations that are not only not purposive, but which represent a collective desire to behave maliciously together. This is an interesting concept because if a group of human beings has been manipulated into behaving collectively badly by a manipulative person then there is some purposive action here. The individual actor is the one who is behaving purposefully while others are behaving at his or her direction.

  What this sort of theory does is explain how human beings can behave in both an individualized and singularity-type fashion. This allows those studying dark psychology to accept Adler’s idea about purposive motivations while also recognizing that people can be controlled by tapping into a capacity for non-purposive, group actions. This almost opens the door for Freudian psychoanalytical thinking to be melded with individual psychology theory. Though Adler might have distanced himself from Freudian ideas of animal motivations in human beings, the inadequacy of his theories in accounting for examples of group narcissism, hysteria, and the like in human beings forces a rapprochement with Freudian theory.

  Therefore, the skillful manipulator can be said to act on individual, purposive, narcissistic motivation while those that are preyed upon perhaps are acting in a non-purposive fashion. What this means for the people who are potential targets is that it becomes important to recognize the tools that the manipulator can use to turn you into putty for their mind control tactics. The goal of this book is to help you to recognize the tricks that manipulators utilize to tap into your primal human motivations. Narcissists and other practitioners of dark psychology can use the following to gain a hold over you:

  Manipulation

  Persuasion

  Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)

  Hypnosis

  Brainwashing

  Mind control

  These are only a few tricks that they can use to cement their control, and they represent the basic strategies in their arsenal of attack. As interconnectivity and globalization have made men and women around the world more connected than ever before, the tools that manipulators have at their disposal to harm and to destroy are greater than ever before. Indeed, incidents of internet abuse have become come commonplace and widespread that they represent almost a collective exhibition in the dark psychological arts. A young person is bullied online, but rather than advocate for goodwill or, at the very least, abstain from participating, other people exposed to the bullying choose to join in. Why?

  If you understand what dark psychology is then these sorts of behaviors will not baffle you. Some describe dark psychology as the use of manipulation or other tools to do harm to others, but this definition does not fully describe the behavioral aspects of human beings that allow these acts to occur. Dark psychology can perhaps better be described as the psychological tendency for human beings to prey on other people out of a desire to do harm or for reasons that lack purpose. The startling observation that Voltaire, the Marquis de Sade, and other philosophers made is that human beings often due to malicious things to others not because they hope to achieve some gain, but for no reason to all. Understanding this may be hard, but it is important to recognize this reality to be prepared for learning the dark psychological arts and to be armed to fight.

  Chapter 2: A Brief History of Dark Psychology

  Human legend is rife with tales of demons and monsters who behave in ways so extreme that the mere tells of them sent shivers down the sides of the adults who listened to these tales as recited by bards and musicians of the past. The existence of monsters warns us that the world is not perhaps as safe as it may seem from inside our window. Monsters live among us and they render our lives as something that must be guarded against, as something that needs to be protected.

  Perhaps as you sleep in your bed a monster crawls out of the closet or creeps in through a window that you forgot to shut. Perhaps you thought you were alone but you hear footsteps creaking up the stairs and a low voice rumbling as it approaches your door. You see a shaggy, hoof-like foot poke out from under the bed or a claw. You hear a deep sinister laugh as you run for your life. You run into the bathroom and you shut the door. It is not exactly a great escape route as your bathroom lacks a window, but you did not know where else to go. Perhaps the monster is on the stairs. You do not know where it is. But then you pull the chain of the overhead bathroom light and you see that the monster is you.

  Monsters live among us and they are referred to scientifically as H. sapiens. Acts of genocide, pillage, and destruction were not conducted by aliens from another planet. They were humans wh
o committed these atrocities and they still live among us today. In applied psychology, there is a term, the so-called dark triad. This term, which we will explore later, refers to the three personality traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. These traits are considered particularly dangerous so it is important to separate these folks out from the general population, or is it?

  The argument can be made that human beings have been accommodating the monstrous parts of their personality since time immemorial. Today we think of common practices of the distant past like human sacrifice, orgiastic religious practices, and ritualized murder (as in the Roman Colosseum) as barbarous acts of the past indicating a time better forgotten, but it has been posited that these acts represented societal outlets for the dark singularity that lies beneath the pretty surface of the human exterior.

  Societies were organized differently then. It will be left to you to decide if times are better now or if they were worse. As garish as the aforementioned practices of the past may have been, their institutionalized status within their societies represented a recognition that human beings had a dark side to their character, and it was better to give this dark side an outlet than to let it simmer and explode in unexpected ways. For what do the gang stalking, cybercrime, serial murder, and narcissistic or antisocial acts of today represent but human beings giving in to sides of themselves that previously gave expression in other ways?

  The point here is not to posit that human beings should give in to their so-called dark singularity tendencies but to suggest that the modern art of dark psychology represents a range of behaviors that were expressed in unique ways in the society of old. Although the discussion of the history of societies giving in to the dark sides of their character may seem peripheral to the discussion of dark psychology few things can be more central. An important step in preparing yourself for defense comes in recognizing that the practitioner of these dark arts can be anyone that you meet. It may be someone that you already know.

  Ritualized Behaviors in Human Society

  Bullfighting is a traditional art on the Iberian Peninsula, but it is a practice that has attracted much criticism in recent decades because of the perception of the brutality that the ritualized killing of the bull represents. Although detractors of the sport have not succeeded in having it eliminated in the Spanish-speaking places where it is still practiced today, there has been an active debate about whether the sport deserves the censure it receives.

  Although there is no question that there is an element of cruelty in the manner in which the bulls are gawked at by an audience as they are killed, the argument has been made that bullfighting is tame compared to what the Romans used to do. We have all seen films in which gladiators are pit against each other or Christians are fed to lions, tigers, or other beasts. What the Romans wanted to witness was a gory spectacle that allowed them to participate, albeit briefly, in the violence that is commonplace for most life on Earth.

  Today, the idea that civilization as advanced as the Romans could have engaged in practice as seemingly brutal and backward as gladiator fights to the death still continues to shock. The Romans considered most of the other groups that they encountered on their frontiers hopelessly barbaric, but today it is they that come across as the barbarians. But, in truth, we live in dogmatic times and the dogma of today does not allow for the equivocal approach to life that characterized the worlds of the Greeks and Romans.

  It has been proposed that what strict adherence to dogma does is force people to become hypocrites. Naturally, some would argue that if one is natively a good person then there is no need for them to behave in a hypocritical fashion. This is the sort of idea that naturally adheres to the belief that there are good people and there are bad people and the bad people deserve to be punished. But what if most people are bad, or, at the very least, what if good people do bad things some of the time? This is the idea that writers like Voltaire and the Marquis de Sade were driving at, and it seems the ancients may have understood this.

  It has been argued that when people are not allowed a natural outlet for their animal emotions then they are liable to act out in ways especially dangerous and destructive. It is easy for societies to label people like this as “bad” because there is a tendency towards a hypocritical approach to human behavior that allows life to be neatly constructed into black and white, good and evil. In the old days, the local judge may have hanged a man for being an adulterer while the judge himself had two women that he was seeing secretly. Who is the bad person here? The adulterer who was hanged or the judge?

  We generally believe that we know right from wrong and can easily tell good from evil when met with it, but as human behavior becomes increasingly better documented it seems that evil is ever-present in ways that were never spoken of before. The advent of the internet and IoT devices has led to the proliferation of acts that would be labeled as evil even by men and women living two thousand years ago. Teenagers goading other teenagers into suicide for fun. Bullying on the internet that leads to acts of violence. Cybercrime. These are all aspects of life that appear to be surfacing as new things in our connected, globalized society. Are they new or do they represent, perhaps, an expression of latent tendencies that were handled differently in the past?

  The King Must Die by Mary Renault is a book that is read in many schools through most students likely do not understand some of the deep themes of the book, at least as they relate to the study of dark psychology. This startling work by Mary Renault attempts to construct the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur as a historical event that the mythmakers made into a compelling story for children (and adults). You see, the Minoans had bullfights of a sort too, or at least a type of bull dance and the idea of ritualized killing that seems so garish today served a function in these ancient times that nothing does today.

  The idea here is not to plant into your head the idea that dark psychology is normal, but to suggest that people may be somewhat different than what you thought they were. The person who you fear may manipulate you and wreak havoc in your life may not be too different from yourself. Indeed, perhaps you have manipulated someone or spread a rumor that was so damaging that it eventually resulted in irreparable harm.

  In The King Must Die, Mary Renault subtly weaves several stories of ritualized death in her construct of lives lived so long ago. Renault was able to do this as, although she may not have been an anthropologist, her work represented a sensitivity to subjects of non-Christian, non-Western European societies that was highly unusual for the time. Renault appreciated the role that these behaviors had in these societies because she approached the study of pre-modern or non-Western cultures outside the standpoint of religious doctrine.

  Those who study dark psychology recognize the potential for evil that exists within all human beings. Societies of the past may have found ways for human beings to release their destructive, possibly even narcissistic energy while minimizing the harm that was done to individuals and to society as a whole. In The King Must Die, the sacrifice of the “king horse” supplants the ritualized sacrifice of the king himself, which was part of the traditional practices of the people of Troezen, the town where Theseus is raised in the book. The sacrifice of the king horse is undertaken for the sake of his people, much like the sacrifice of the king before had been taken as an act to benefit the common people. This idea of the ultimate sacrifice in the form of a ritualized death as a type of munificent act or even an atonement for the actions or motivations of others takes an early form in this idea, which would be repeated in later religions.

  There is a need for the deeds, thoughts, or internal motivations of a large group of people to be atoned for based on the recognition that these deeds, thoughts, and motivations are malevolent and would derail society if they were allowed to continue without some form of regulation. Therefore, the manner in which societies of the past allowed their citizenry an outlet for their dark energies can be construed as not indicating objective evil on the part of th
e people in these societies but was part of a wider plan to keep these sorts of dark energies contained.

  It has not been until recently that psychologists and others have begun to recognize that humans are motivated to behave in a wantonly evil way. It is often said in conversation that a particular act is “evil” or a particular person is “evil” based on a perception that an individual has committed a harmful act for a selfish or indefensible reason, but malevolence can also take the form of committing acts that are objectively bad for no reason at all. This is what often baffles the victim of dark psychological tactics: that another would wantonly harm or destroy with no “motive” or goal. It is this bafflement, this inability to understand the basics of human behavior, which allows the target of these tactics to be easy prey.

  An exploration of the history of dark psychological study will perhaps prepare your mind for the harsh realities that your psyche will face in the world today. For it is your psyche that will be the target of the manipulator and the narcissist, and it is your psyche that it is the weapon of mind control. This is what the practitioner of dark psychological tactics does: they turn your own mind against you, disallowing you from realizing that your own thoughts, your own emotions, your own motivations originate from the manipulator and these are the tools that will destroy you.