Sociopathy is another term for Anti-Social Personality Disorder. “It’s a mental health condition where somebody persistently has difficulty engaging appropriately with social norms.” The science says that “they often break rules or laws and can behave aggressively or impulsively.”
That sounds pretty negative, but it also sounds like most of us struggling with puberty or even a “bad hair day.” One common attribute of anti-social behavior is having a shortage of empathy. Empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference. They have difficulty understanding another person’s perspective.
However, on the other side, a “positive sociopath” with low empathy can tend to view everyone as equal, meaning not thinking and living by the normal social norms that one race, one religion, one skin color, or one culture is any better than another. If there is no “one” that is better, it also means that there is no “one” that is worse.
A “positive sociopath” would more easily adjust to changing situations since he or she might not view the “old ways” as being any better as something new that might come along.
There is much confusion that comes to me head on through comments and messages that are more frequent as the days go on and the world seems to be deteriorating. Old ideas and old paradigms do not provide the comfort that they used to and we all—humans and animals and maybe even plants—love our “comfort zone.” Even that phase is comforting; an encircled spot of physical and mental ease and freedom from pain.
The last few months may have destroyed your sense of “empathy,” that is knowing/understanding how the world should function especially as regards money. It has been like finding out that your friendly and generous next-door neighbor has been arrested for being a serial killer, burying the bodies in the backyard after cooking the corpses.
Remember being told that cryptocurrencies would protect against the inflation that would destroy the dollar’s purchasing power? Michael J. Saylor is a Bitcoin billionaire and deserves both our admiration and envy. Why not? I wish I was a Bitcoin billionaire. He posted on Twitter that currencies have collapsed against the dollar over the past year. He is absolutely correct. But what he did not mention is that BTC is one of, if not the worst performing civilized “currency” down 58 percent during the past 12 months, even worse than his most extreme example, the Turkish lira having fallen 52 percent. Actually, cryptos might not have been a bad idea for us in the Philippines at the right price, as always.
People have come to expect that the currency of a “basket-case” economy led by a corrupt and incompetent government—Argentina for example—to fall to historic lows against the dollar during difficult times. But how can rational minds not have the skulls holding their brains explode when on the same day that “Philippine peso hits all-time low,” “Sterling hits all-time low.”
Anyone with even a sliver of empathy for fellow humans knows that we must sacrifice to save Mother Earth. Then we read that “the fake meat industry is getting ground into hamburger,” according to Deloitte Consulting, with “sales of meat alternatives at retailers are down 10.5 percent by volume for the 52-weeks ending September 4, 2022.” McDonald’s even eliminated their test “McPlant Burger” without telling anyone.
Home to the European Commission and the European Council, Belgium is at the forefront of bringing a New World Order based on the European Union model. Now though, Bart De Wever, mayor of Belgium’s largest city of Antwerp seems to be “sociopathic” with “difficulty engaging appropriately with social norms.”
“In America people are not in this shit. Oil, gas, and coal were no longer allowed. No investments were allowed in reserves. Germany does not have a single LNG terminal (a terminal for the liquefied natural gas being imported from the US and Middle East). The dumbest countries, Germany and Belgium, have phased out nuclear energy. We have pushed away all energy sources, making ourselves dependent on Putin.” It is unlikely that Mayor Wever will be invited to European Commission President Von der Leyen’s Christmas party this year.
It’s all enough to make a grown man shed a tear into his Negroni cocktail. But then again, time for us sociopaths to have another.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.