Psychopath vs. Empath: the War Between Truth and Deception

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer

Waking Times
January 22, 2015

“The supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation.” –Baruch Spinoza

Are you fighting for your servitude as if for your salvation? Then you have been well-deceived. You have been sheeple-compromised. Your thoughts are not your own. Your actions are not your own. You are in all ways a conditioned puppet who is under the delusion that it is free, and the psychopaths of the world are your uncompromising puppet masters. The questions you need to be asking yourself are these: “Am I willing to do what it takes to become free? Am I ready for the uncomfortableness of undeceiving myself? Would I rather be slapped by the truth or kissed with a lie? Am I willing to sacrifice my comfortable lie for the uncomfortable truth? Am I strong enough to fall from the “grace” of my delusion onto the hard and unforgiving ground of truth? And most of all: do I have the courage to disobey?”

In order to answer these questions effectively, indeed in order to come up with better questions, we must be able to transform our would-be psychopathology into a courageous in-the-now empathology.

Cancer begins with a group of cells that fail to communicate with the conscious signal of the host. These cells become competitive instead of cooperative. When competition become primary and cooperation secondary, then we know we have failed as a species. Collectively, among every human, vanity leads to segregation and competition, competition leads to fear and greed, greed leads to deceit and immorality and deceit and immorality is the breeding ground for illness waging war on each other and our earth. Every act of hatred and self-destructiveness in our world begins with self-hate and self-destructiveness. And it all begins with a breakdown in communication.

We have lost the ability to communicate with each other as natural human beings. We have lost the ability to communicate with nature in a healthy way. These unconscious acts of unlearning are systemic and passed down from unhealthy generation to unhealthy generation. It’s time to break apart the parochial chain of our outdated value system. It’s time to unfuck ourselves out of this unhealthy and unsustainable debacle. Like R.D. Laing said, “We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

The simplest way is to be the change we wish to see in the world so that we can be a force of nature powerful enough to also change the world. But another way is to undeceive ourselves, to become compassionate and empathic to the plight of others, and to sprinkle bits of truth over the mass deception like seeds that will eventually grow into a force to be reckoned with.

As it stands, mankind is caught in the cycle of fear, apathy and hatred. A society based upon fear, apathy and hatred sets up a system which is fundamentally incapable of producing health and happiness and thereby represses human development. And here we are: living in a world where human development is being repressed, at the detriment of our individual health and the health of the ecosystem. However, our escape from this unhealthy pattern lies not only in rebellion, but also in the cultivation of a personal freedom and a relinquishing of all forms of anesthesia and self-deception.

Indeed, while authentic freedom is not easily attained, its deficiency is evident in the devastation to both the individual and the greater culture, as the myopic conformists seek to victimize each other and repeatedly inflict violence upon the world in order to maintain the illusion of comfort and power that is being protected by the banner of their deception. Like Arno Gruen said, “If people base their identity on identifying with authority, freedom causes anxiety. They must then conceal the victim in themselves by resorting to violence against others.”

Understand: the world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one in which you are free; whether that world be your family, your country, your religion, or your politics. Escape any world that doesn’t allow you to be free. A clear sign that you are not free is that you are being deceived. The question is: are you okay with being deceived? As Chris Hedges warns, “We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception,” It is precisely these virtual worlds that we need to turn the tables on. Virtual worlds are tools. We need to go from being irresponsible tools succumbing to a deceptive system, to using our tools responsibly and empathically so as to transform the system into a healthier version of itself.

There is a war going on between manipulative liars and compassionate truth tellers, between psychopaths and empaths. Which side are you on? This also begs the question: are you lying to yourself, which happens to be one of the most difficult questions to answer honestly, but ask it you must, lest you fall too easily into the hands of the nearest con artist or snake-oil salesman. Beware the tyranny of habit. Be not inflexible. The more elastic and fluid you are, the more you’ll stay afloat when the crushing waters of vicissitude come crashing through, and the more you’ll be prepared to be a beacon of hope for others. Change is not easy, it never has been. But change is inevitable. We either wreck ourselves and the world trying to prevent it, or we adapt and overcome in order to evolve with it.

One of my duties as a periphery keeper in this world is to penetrate deception, turn over rocks, awaken people to concealed truths, and to create deep awareness. I say, instead of trying to possess Truth; let yourself be possessed by it. So it goes: I am not a victim of the world, I am the world. But that wasn’t always the case. I used to work for the NSA via the US Navy as a cryptoanalyst. Yes, I was naïve. I, like many innocent sailors, soldiers, airmen, and marines, was duped into believing that I was honorably fighting and spying to protect the lives of the innocent people of the world. I was wrong. I was bamboozled. We were bamboozled. That was all just doublespeak. We were actually there to fight and spy on behalf of an immoral plutocratic corporate regime that is still in power today. We were there to be pawns in a giant game of chess over oil and power. We were conditioned cogs in an immoral clock of systematic propaganda and unethical orders. They used fear tactics to keep us paranoid. They used false titles and fake rank to play upon our passions. They used those same false titles to play upon our pride, by giving us empty ribbons, flashy medals of nothing, and rank that meant nothing more than that you were a good little obedient sheep to an immoral juggernaut of well-deceived men. Well screw that! War is not peace. Ignorance is not strength. Freedom is not slavery.

“If you would be a real seeker after truth,” wrote Rene Descartes, “it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” And so I did exactly that. I decided to undeceive myself, using a ruthless self-interrogation process and a humor of the most high to reveal the truth hidden behind the smoke and mirrors of mass deception. What I learned rocked my world, as it has many others. But my liberation was my salvation. The pain that came from knowledge was exceptionally more rewarding than the bliss that came from ignorance. My fall was profound, but when I hit the ground, I relearned how to fall in love. Like Sogyal Rinpoche said, “Each time the losses and deceptions of life teach us about impermanence, they bring us closer to the truth. When you fall from a great height, there is only one possible place to land: on the ground — the ground of truth. And if you have the understanding that comes from spiritual practice, then falling is in no way a disaster, but the discovery of an inner refuge.”

The only way that deception is moral is through the artistic process. Like Marco Tempest said, “Art is a deception that creates real emotions — a lie that creates a truth. And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.” We need more of this magic, especially in a world more and more devoid of magic. It is magic precisely because it transforms deception into truth, and so has the power to transform psychopaths into empaths, by planting seeds like tiny, packaged beacons of hope.

Whether it is Charlie Hebdo comic strips or articles like this one, art can literally change the world. Our audacious art is like swordplay in the brain, proving that the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. With it we can cut the yoke of deception that has been passed down from an unethical power structure made up of psychopathic men hell-bent on maintaining their power to the extent that it is destroying the world.

Like Arno Gruen said, “No matter how much lip service those committed to power (psychopaths) may pay to the principle of equality (empaths), they can never approach their fellow human beings on an equal footing; their relationships with others are defined solely in terms of power and weakness. Therefore, they must accumulate as much power as possible, with the aim of becoming invulnerable and proving this invulnerability.” It is the duty of artistic empaths the world over to meet this false invulnerability with the truer power of absolute vulnerability, and art will be our vehicle. Courage is not being invulnerable, like a machine. Courage is not an unwavering hardness, like a tank. It is a soft plasticity, like water. I beseech you, you who would dare greatly, look not for what’s solid within you, look instead for what is soft and malleable. The courage will come. Like Bruce Lee pouring water in and out of a cup, saying “Be water, my friend,” your softness will take shape and assume the form of empathy which has the power to crush all forms of psychopathology, and its shape will be an adventure of the most high.

People often ask me, baffled, “Why do you go against the laws of men?” And I say to them, “Because your swords will never be as sharp as my pen.”

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

©2015 Waking Times, all rights reserved. For permission to re-print this article contact wakingtimes@gmail.com, or the respective author.

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6 Signs you May be an Übermensch

January 7, 2015
Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff
Waking Times

“The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge –a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest.” –Nietzsche

The Übermensch, or Overman, is the primordial prodigy, the interdependent-self, the chameleon of the human condition, the epistemological elite longing to emerge. The Overman is the “genius” that Jesus spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth the genius within you, it will free you. If you do not bring forth the genius within you, it will destroy you.” In a world where the majority of people have not brought forth the genius within themselves, it is no wonder things are being destroyed. It is therefore the duty, indeed the quest, of overmen the world over to bring forth the genius within themselves, to stand as beacons of hope, to go forth as walking examples of genius incarnate, so that others may learn how to do the same. Here are six signs you may be on the sacred path of the Ubermensch.

1.) You Have Perfected the Art of Self-Overcoming:

“The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learned, and arrives at the new truth with hands bloodstained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.” –Jose Ortega y Gasset

You have freed yourself from the smoke and mirrors of “security” and the illusion of “comfort.” Indeed, you have freed yourself to create new freedom. You have once again transformed yourself into a self-propelled beast, a sacred cycle, the walking personification of the life-death-rebirth process of the human condition. Self-overcoming (self-interrogation) is a tool of conviviality that you use to dig up the courage within the primordial self so that it may defend itself, and life itself, against the degradation of the inert self. The inert self is the part of us that wishes everything would stay the same. You understand that it is precisely this part of us which must be overcome, because permanence is the ultimate illusion. Fixed conviction is a grave error that leaves us petrified and stuck. Like Daniel Kolak wrote in Experience of Philosophy, “There is a frozen sea within us. Philosophy is an axe.” You have learned how to use this axe with self-actualized precision, and you have therefore become quite adept at bringing meaning to the meaninglessness.

2.) You Have the Ability to Transform Suffering Into Strength:
“To live is to suffer and to survive is to find meaning in this suffering.” –Nietzsche

You are willing to suffer in order to discover your greatness, knowing that pain is the ultimate teacher next to nature herself. You are purposefully vulnerable, realizing that it’s the only way to learn about the weakness within invulnerability. You recycle your vulnerability by propelling yourself and others to create waves of change in a world starving for change. You direct your passion and your compassion by spreading your art and your heart only across what matters most. Like Simone De Beauvoir, your “contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy.” You seek tasks that would cause others to curl up into a ball of fear, because you have learned how to transform fear into courage. You realize that the secret to transforming suffering into strength is to embrace, and thereby subsume, the vicissitudes of change. You do not fear change because you’ve learned how to change fear into a courage of the most high.

3.) You Accept Your Own Dionysian Nature and Use it Appropriately:

“The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.” –Nietzsche

As a liberated artist you represent the Dionysian endeavor toward wild, carefree creativity. You have chosen to embody a wide spectrum of the human experience, lusting for the gruesome ecstasy of the sensual world yet capturing and expressing it all through your art. The Dionysian innovator is a perfect example of divergent thinking, which you embrace with all your heart. The Apollonian artist, on the other hand, relies on convergent thinking; which is fine, as balance is necessary. But since we live in a rigid, stuck-in-the-muck, overly convergent thinking society, you see how important Dionysian energy really is. You are not a collection of mirrors reflecting what everyone else expects of you. You are self-shattered, Chaos theory in motion, laughing mightily with God’s tongue in your cheek. You declare to the lopsided Apollonian culture, “You can have your Apollonian rigidness; I’ll take Dionysian courage and astonish you all.”

4.) You Are Neither Restricted by Tradition Nor Bounded by Convention:
 
“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

You shirk tradition and convention in order to remain open to what the vicissitudes of change have to teach you. You refuse to live out a harried life of nine-to-five slavery, wasting your days on heartless corporations that don’t give a damn about anything except making money. Instead, you wish to live a life of adventure full of doing what you love to do, despite the powers that be and in spite of the tyranny that wishes to contain you? You use rebellion and the art of Social Gadflying as a tool for obliterating unsustainable hierarchies, and as a leveler of close-minded elitist pretension. You’re not driven by petty revenge or egoistic one-upmanship. You emphasize and actualize what you disrupt, seeking not to discredit and embarrass the status quo of your mischief, but to shock it into becoming more self-authentic. Yours is a celebration of the soul instead of the conditioned reflex and self-aggrandizement of the ego. You love what you profane, weaving your knowledge and experience together with the status quo, you honor your engagement with it even as you tweak it out of its extremism. You show them the door to their freedom and declare: “enter if you dare!”

5.) You Are Willing to Risk All For the Enhancement of Humanity:

“You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.” –Nietzsche

“He who flies is hated most of all”? You fly anyway, soaring over the culturally constructed illusion of it all. You are willing to be “the odd man out,” refusing to give into the unconscious peer-pressure of the herd-instinct. Your conscious awareness propels you past the unconscious comfort zone, which is infective and causes others to want to do the same. You are wholly natural and holistically ascetic. The unconscious of anyone living in an artificial manner senses you as doubly dangerous. Everything about you irritates them, your way of writing, your sense of humor. They sense nature in you, and they are afraid. They are afraid that you will call them out; that you will break their soft illusory shell of “security” and “safety,” and reveal the pulsing blister of the vulnerable Self suffering underneath. You are an icon of iconoclasm, a force of nature that leads by example whether or not anybody else decides to “follow.” You are willing to die bringing water to the wasteland.

6.) You Seek Power Over Power:

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” –Abraham Lincoln

You have learned how to break the chain of obedience that plagues mankind. You have cut the strings dangling down from the highest echelons of power. You are capable of clipping yokes and cutting away the straps that bind the heavy burden of parochial values. You have turned the tables on the “powers that be” by getting power over power. You realize that those at “the top” deserve neither your pity nor your rancor. They deserve nothing more than your unadulterated laughter and high humor: a thumbing of your nose that all at once keeps them in check and prevents their “absolute power” from corrupting absolutely. But you have also learned, as Naseem Nicholas Taleb suggested, that “you don’t become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.” And so you have learned to recycle your own mastery. You have dared to rejoin your rationality with your primordial unconscious. You live multi-dimensionally, refusing to live the one-dimensional life of the typical man. Indeed, you stand in defense against the typical man, the “last man,” the “despicable man,” the “man who would destroy everything despite himself.” You stand in defense of those who would horde power by empowering the powerless and teaching them how to expiate that power. You disclose the world with the purpose of freedom and further disclosure, and by the same action try to free others from enclosure into disclosure. Deep within you find the exigency which is common to all men and women: the will to freedom, the will to power, and the will to conquer both so as to make compassionate action manifest. Like David DeGraw said, “The more you empower people, the more empowered you become. It creates a positive feedback loop, an evolutionary feedback loop that cannot be stopped.”

About the Author

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide awake view of the modern world.

©2015 Waking Times, all rights reserved. For permission to re-print this article contact wakingtimes@gmail.com, or the respective author.

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