OK, the title is a little cheap. I hoped the provocative rewrite of a Whitney Houston song title would grab your interest. To the extent that it did I’m glad and I’D DO IT 1 MILLION TIMES AGAIN!
Seriously, thank you for giving me your attention.
Do you find yourself confused about why people do bad things? Do you say to yourself, "That can't be what he means, because that would mean he likes doing bad things that hurt people. Since that can't be true, well gee, it's a mystery!"
No, it's not. It's that you, a normal person, are projecting. You are projecting your normal-person-values onto someone who is not normal. They're not like you. They don't want the best for everyone.
They have a personality disorder, excess narcissism and a lack of conscience.
How can you tell? It's not that hard, actually. And no, it doesn't require a psych degree. You, an ordinary human, have the ability to do this. Every normal human does. We've been doing it for tens of thousands of years, as psychopaths have always been among us.
How? Bill Eddy of the High Conflict Institute has a great rule of thumb. He asks you to think in 90/10.
I'll explain.
Say you observe Joe doing something that seems really disproportionate to the situation. Maybe he started screaming. Maybe he accused a mutual friend of something horrible. Maybe he threw a fit and ruptured friendships. Maybe he took revenge way out of proportion to the alleged offense.
Ask yourself this: "What would 90 percent of people do in Joe's situation?"
If your answer is that 90 percent of people would have acted differently than Joe, then you have determined that it is Joe who is not right.
This is really simple, but most people don't think through this unless they're prompted.
TLDR; there's no need at all to be "confused" by people who act this way. There is no confusion except you trying not to see reality. Once you accept that there are, in actual fact in the real world, people who are psychopaths and narcissists, there is no confusion.
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Much as I concur with Eddy's rule (under your context given), it didn't hold from 2020 onwards; in fact it flipped to the opposite. Here's why I say that: nearly no one had a close friend or relative rushed to hospital for a hitherto unknown deadly killer disease (save for the tv soap opera theatrics playing 24/7 throughout the nation, and a "friend of a friend of a friend"). No one was dropping dead in the streets. So one would normally have thought to themselves; "What pandemic?" and "Our hospitals are emptied" and suchlike. But no, governments everywhere took actions light years out of proportion to what normal observers could see with their own eyes, ears and common sense. And 90 % of those "normal observers" fell in line with the psychopathic regime. Which serves to endorse your thesis Josh that we're living in a Cluster B-captured world. Not normal by any stretch.
Short and sharp. This is a great coaching strategy to penetrate the deeply held construct that one needs to see the good in everyone (to be a good person) at the expense of their wellbeing.