Reply #173: so here's the big question

[iverglas]

Did you kill anyone?

Did you ever plan to kill anyone, fantasize about killing someone, focus enough hatred on anyone or any group of people that you wanted to kill them?


I suspect that instead of being a woman hater, which turned people off and isolated him from society, I suspect he was simply a loner who never fit into society, and over time that turned to rage against the part of society that he longed for companionship with most - women.

I think he was a woman hater.

I don't think he longed for companionship. I think he thought he was ENTITLED to sexual contact with women, and women were duty bound to provide it for him.


Depression is in my genes, both sides, and I didn't escape it. Mind, my teenaged suicide fantasies were more existential than depressed, although it's a rare teenager who doesn't have depressive tendencies.

I was a total social misfit as a kid. Not cute, not interested in my cohort's stuff, their sports or their music or their fashions, just your basic kid genius who couldn't relate. Even in the kid genius class, a misfit, and actually to even worse effect: it was a strange coincidence in my city of 100,000 or so that the 60 brainest kids (chosen basically by IQ testing) came almost entirely from the north end and wealthy professional families. I came from a lower-middle/upper-working class east end family. About five of us did, and we were reminded of it in every little way. Being not cute, not athletic, female and from the east end was three years of hell.

Years later, a teacher fawned over me at a reunion I went to so I could see how the rich kids turned out -- praising the good works I had done in my profession and saying she'd always known I had the most potential of them all. And yet what I remember is her correcting my working-class pronunciation in front of the class when I was 10: "vase" is supposed to be pronounced "vahse", doncha know. I was in touch with one of the other five east-enders a couple of years ago after decades of no contact; she has a doctoral degree from Cornell, and works with abused women. And her bitterness and sadness at that elementary school experience sounded to be as open a wound now as it was then. Outsiders, no matter where you are. A whole lot of us, of people, really are, you know?

I got politics, and got over it: rich people don't impress me anymore; I'm richer than many of them now, and they make me laugh. I also got out -- abandoned high school and went to another city at 16 for university, reinvented myself. Part of it was easy; at 16, I suddenly became very seriously cute. And at the same time became an atheist, a socialist, a feminist, and then a philosophy student, and started organizing campus political stuff. I never thought of anything I did as fitting in or being normal or getting accepted. I did what I wanted to do and what I thought should be done.

But the funny thing is, I still had no sense of myself. I gave up on acid after not too long because I started having those experiences people describe when they come back from the dead: you find yourself looking out at the world from a tunnel, and when you try to see what's in the tunnel, there's nothing there. When you're dying, that's your brain - your personality - shutting down. When you're on acid, it's you looking at Jim and Jim and Rick, and saying huh, that's Jim and Jim and Rick, and they're acting just like Jim and Jim and Rick; what am I, and how am I supposed to act? Uh ... no idea; nothing. Three hours of catatonic smiling ensue ... Again, years later, I learned that others in my gang envied me for having such a strong personality and being so sure of myself. News to me.

I didn't feel like having sex until I was in 2nd year university - late, compared to my peers, but my peers were my classmates and housemates who were 21 and 22 and I was 18. So when I felt like it, I did. Yes, we women have the advantage there, I suppose. Although if it was that easy for me, it was presumably that easy for the men involved. It taking two, and all.

The current co-vivant was in a rock band when I was doing all that. He didn't have sex til he was 21, and then not all that much. For pity's sake, does anyone really believe that everybody else is having all the sex we somehow get the impression they're having?? (Although he apparently did do it on the subway once. He's got the depression genes and the depression too; and he had seriously problematic parents. He's never had any desire to kill anybody, as far as I know.)


Being depressed and blaming other people for one's problems are not necessary corollaries, and in fact tend to be quite different things. And depression involves an absence of self-worth, not a feeling of entitlement. Blaming others and feeling entitled are much more classic indications of a personality disorder. Maybe in a person who isn't smart enough to get what they want by manipulating, an unsuccessful narcissist, depression follows.


Hmm. I see you say you did consider taking guns to school and putting an end to it all. Well, it's not that it can't happen. I think it's less likely in a middle-aged person, for depression to launch them into months of hateful thoughts and words, and plotting to kill -- and in this case, as in the case of Marc Lépine at the Montreal Polytechnique, for instance, to kill individuals who themselves have nothing to do with the person's problem, who merely represent the group he sees as the cause of his problems. Women.

Men kill women. Men harm women. They kill their intimate partners, they rape strangers, and some, like Lépine and Sodini, kill groups of strangers, because they are women.

This isn't a sign of depression. Depression doesn't cause misogyny. A personality that accepts no responsibility, that feels entitled, is a personality ripe for misogyny when it goes looking for an object of its need to blame and punish. Women are vulnerable targets. Women are already objectified in our society and the mind of the person in question. He is entitled to sex -- women are for sex. He can't get any. It's women's fault. Because nothing is his fault. Taking responsibility isn't an option, for someone like this. He gets miserable enough, what he needs is vengeance.

And there just is not sufficient evidence in this case that his actions stemmed from anything but his supreme narcissism and feelings of entitlement.

He doesn't talk about women he likes and can't succeed with, or about what a relationship would bring him that he's missing. He talks about wanting sex, and vilifies women who have sex with other men, and women in general.


When they endure years of being a social outcast they come to believe that there truly is something wrong with them and that they are, in fact, worthless.

It really is possible that they are just horrible people, and that's why nobody wants to be around them.


Aha! I just googled the term I coined up there, "unsuccessful narcissist". First up:

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article2439812.ece

In therapy, Young tries to engage “the lonely shamed child” that he sees as the source of the pain for an individual with NPD. All of which is difficult to achieve, because even if a person agrees to treatment, Young points out dryly, he may walk out unless the therapist keeps telling him he’s simply the best; ordinary won’t do.

“A lot of people only come because they’ve been sent by desperate partners or bosses. Successful narcissists have something extra that means people tolerate their bad behaviour. The most dangerous is the unsuccessful narcissist. He doesn’t have money or power or charm, so he’s fired a lot of the time. He drives more and more people away, until he ends up alone and a very bleak person.”

In treatment, people diagnosed with NPD are divided into two groups. In one are “pure” or thick-skinned narcissists. They have often been extremely spoilt and indulged and given no boundaries as children. In the second group are thin-skinned narcissists, such as Vaknin, who have grown up feeling unloved and unlovable. Young says the former are almost impossible to help; the latter may respond to therapy. “If there’s no change in a year, the chances of success are low. The person with NPD will constantly try to prove he is superior to the therapist; that the professional knows nothing.”

I think that's exactly what I've been getting at. ;)