❂ To lie about others' perception of her. "Everyone tells me how paranoid you have become."
Mallory prefers to lie in private. When Alice is alone and cut off from other people, she wants to believe Mallory. Faced with a constant flow of untruths, she starts to doubt her memories and even her sanity. This is a pragmatic tool for mind control. Unscrupulous interrogators can use it[49] to extract false confessions.
The Gods of Lies
Mallory lies to confuse her victims. She also lies to conceal. She conceals who she talks to, where she goes, and what she does. She is so secretive about her real life that even her own family are unaware. And Mallory lies for profit, to escape criminal prosecution, and to frame other people. She mixes lies into banal truth, to confuse and distract.
Mallory is Loki, the shape-shifting Norse god of trickery and untruths. Her love and talent for lying are central to her predatory nature. To be a predator is to deceive your prey. When she lies, no matter the occasion, she feels the thrill of the chase.
I’ve seen Mallory lie, and it is a remarkable thing. I’m sure she can stroll through lie detector tests without leaving a trace. It goes further than not showing a stress response. When she tells you that black is a shade of white, it feels better than the truth.
How does Mallory do this? How does Mallory project untruth to feel more solid than mere statements of fact? I think it is another blue egg story. Mallory mimics the signals for sincerity, and speaks with authority and confidence. This triggers our belief response. The more the psychopath amplifies those signals, the more we believe. It is like Puss in Boots' wide eyes in the movie Shrek 2[50].
To understand how Mallory can lie like Loki, first accept that we all lie. We start lying as young children and we socialize ourselves out of it. We become honest liars. We accept and repeat stories we know are only partly true yet are better than empty space. All stories are lies to some degree. "It is sunny outside" is a lie. What does "sunny" mean? Half-true stories make the world simpler and more digestible. This book is full of such stories. Only a dysfunctional mind cannot deal with gentle lies.
So we all lie, and we know this about each other. It is a human universal. Truth is a negotiated average of semi-lies. We have evolved ways to get more accurate stories by talking to each other. "It’s sunny outside," says one person. "I just saw dark clouds on the horizon," says another. Together they get a better story: "it’s sunny and may rain later." The stories become solid, reproducible. We build them into theories, share them and pass them on.
So as we talk, we exchange fluffy lies and distill them into hard truths. For this to work, we must try to believe people even when we guess they are inaccurate. We measure the speaker for sincerity, and when we see that, we accept. The more sincere the speaker, the more we accept. We can always correct mistakes later.
Social humans cannot fake sincerity, by definition. When we tell an "honest" lie, we are sincere about it. When we tell a deliberate lie, we show tiny twitches. Our imaginations take over from our memories, and the shift in gears shows in our eyes. So, we are honest liars.
Mallory is different. She fakes sincerity like she fakes anger, affection, jealousy, sadness. From an early age she studies others' faces and body language. She becomes a perfect mimic. She is born with this talent, visible in some children just a few years old. She can amplify the triggers at no cost, so she is better than the original.
The second thing about Mallory’s lies is how rich and detailed they are. You can of course catch her out, if you know what is going on. If you don’t then you just get a convincing flood of detail. It is as if Mallory creates an imaginary situation, then describes this to you.
Mallory does not seem to try to remember these imaginary situations. Maybe there are too many, for too many different people. So the reliable way to catch her lies is to record them, and compare them over time.
It is how some psychologists get the truth out of people. Ask the same question in five different ways, and compare the answers. A sincere person will tell the same story five times. A psychopath may change the story each time. This is how honest police work, when questioning a suspect. For this to work, I think the questions must come from different people, and over time.
If Mallory has children, they grow up with her lies as a daily diet. The children of narcissists often report having above-average memories for events and conversations. This is anecdotal data. It could be correlation as well as causation. Mallory, after all, has genetic talents for conversation and mimicry. Her children inherit these, to some extent.
Machines of Chaos
Many children of psychopaths describe their parents as "chaos machines." Mallory spreads chaos in different ways. He tends to disrupt the lives of everyone around him. Sometimes it looks like incompetence, sometimes like neglect, and sometimes like simple carelessness. I’ve come to believe it’s deliberate, even if it’s often subconscious. Organizations often use the same techniques:
❂ Chaotic planning, in which Mallory’s time is precious and Alice’s time is worthless. Mallory will make short-term demands of Alice. This interrupts her schedule and makes a mess of her planning. If Alice dares to act like this, Mallory attacks her irresponsibility and punishes her.
❂ Alice may lose all control over her schedule, leaving Mallory to plan her every move. This is typical of cults, and also happens in some relationships and some organizations. Mallory can combine this with sleep deprivation. Then Alice has no private time in which to analyse her situation.
❂ Removing Alice’s personal spaces. Organizations often do this by creating communal areas for working, eating, and meeting. Some psychopathic businesses ban all personalization. They enforce "order" and sterility of spaces, the so-called "clean desk" principle. Since humans are territorial, the lack of any private space damages our self-confidence.
❂ Mistreating or neglecting items that Alice cares about. Organizations may ban personal choices when it comes to items people identify with. Here, you will use a corporate laptop. In personal relationships, Mallory will mistreat Alice’s property: cars, apartments, photographs, clothes. It is violence by proxy. It depresses her, and she then detaches. She realizes she cannot stop such mistreatment. So she stops trying, and stops caring. And the less she cares about her possessions, the less she cares about herself.
So chaos can take various forms. An employer may demand that Bob give up his free time. The firm may send him on business trips without notice. They may put him on irregular and disruptive shifts. At the same time, Bob will have to plan his vacation six months in advance. He may not know until the last minute whether he will actually be able to leave.
In the home, Mallory will go out, and return, without warning. He will bring home spectacular and flashy dramas involving real or imaginary protagonists. He will crash the car and it will never be his fault. He will start disruptive projects like renovations and insist everyone get involved. And he will leave these projects half-finished for months or years. He plans tasks for others, yet rarely shares his own calendar.
If talking to others is hard, maybe Alice can find a quiet moment to herself. Just to process the day’s events. Mallory makes sure this is impossible. Early in their relationship, he will cling to Alice day and night. He smothers her with chatter, intense sexual activity, and passionate arguments. Later, he disrupt Alice’s schedule with endless trivial-yet-urgent tasks, so she cannot relax. And later, he builds up the ever-present threat of emotional and physical violence. Alice retreats into depression and starts to shut down.