Rigid sterile order has the same effect as chaos. Imagine that someone goes into your email every night and messes with your emails. They delete some, move others to the wrong folders, and so on. It is all "clean" and yet nothing is where it should be. At first you get irritated and angry. Then you try to take steps to stop it. When all this fails, you give up and abandon your email. Or, you accept that someone else is now in charge of your life.
In a world of chaos, we regress to juvenile acceptance of authority. This reaction is well known to propagandists, who depend on it. Keep your public on a steady diet of shock and horror chaos. They won’t question the corruption and repression.
Magic and Illogic
Karl Popper wrote: "We are social creatures to the inmost center of our being."
Our superpower, as a species, is to think together about large problems. We do this by building theories of the world. We refine these over time, and we teach them to younger generations. Our minds collect observations and use them to test our theories. We do this from our first to our last breath.
We seem to construct theories out of nothing. We take observations and gut feelings. We chatter with others, and with ourselves. We take the endless theories delivered to us by past generations. We design new, or improved theories. We encode them in language and words. And we argue, remember, and share them.
Popper argued that there are two kinds of theory. There are scientific theories, which we can falsify with data or observations. And there are magical theories, which we cannot. To put this another way: you cannot ever prove that a theory is true. Absolute truth is unreachable, like an irrational number. What is the absolute value of pi? You can try, and fail to prove a theory wrong. When you remove all that is wrong, what remains is a closer approximation to the truth.
We can disprove or improve scientific theories like "Tiny invisible creatures spread diseases." We can neither disprove nor improve magical ones like "Evil spirits spread diseases." Magical theories are not only not true. They are — to quote the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli — "not even wrong."
When a social mind shapes a theory, it remixes existing theories with new observations. It adds in guesses, assumptions, and beliefs. It mixes in myths, legends, hypotheses, memes, and lies. It tries to connect those into a consistent story. The process takes time. In such minds, lies are temporary scaffolding that we correct over time.
Mallory lies to confuse, manipulate, and hide. She does not seek truth, only control. Her mind constructs magical theories in a heartbeat. She describes with complete sincerity. This is an assault, a weapon, a form of violence. In Mallory’s theories, truth is temporary scaffolding to replace over time with lies.
A magical theory has no solution, and can absorb infinite amounts of thought. That disrupts logical thinking. In the software security business we call this a "denial of service attack." Every cult and religion grows around magical theories. So do many business ventures, and many relationships. How can you disprove or improve "Fate means us to be together" as a theory?
Magical theories tend to develop their own secret languages, jargons, and idioms. Invented words often carry magical meanings that the listener cannot negotiate. Psychopathic organizations tend to invent private languages that are confusing and hard to learn. And then they change these languages often and without cause. They force their members to listen to and learn complex doctrines. More denial of service.
Unable to process the flood of illogic, Alice gives up making sense of her world. She accepts Mallory’s statements. She accepts his justifications. She treats him with respect and love, even as he is consuming her.
Crime and Punishment
After enough pain and theft, Bob may wake up and think of rebellion. So Mallory carries another weapon, which is fear. Before Bob gets to the point of revolt, Mallory has already been working hard. She redefines the relationship around fear. She creates an atmosphere of terror. It is so deep and tangible that Bob thinks of killing himself rather than challenge her.
As I explained in The Hunt, you can spot abuse victims by the nervous way they walk. It’s the deep-seated fear of tripping up and unleashing their tormentor’s anger. Mallory builds the fear by rewarding and punishing Bob in the most confusing way.
Mallory likes to change the rules arbitrarily, and make rules that are inconsistent, intrusive, and impossible to not break. The rules never apply to her. Bob has no appeal, and no voice. He must accept the rules, or leave. So, Mallory can punish Bob arbitrarily, and keep him always on the defense.
Complex and arbitrary rules are a staple of religious cults and other psychopathic organizations. These rules regulate what to eat, and when. They define dress codes for every occasion. They regulate language. They limit who may talk to whom, where, when, and about what topics.
Good rules are in fact important. They block that tactic of making up new rules to suit the purpose, so Bob is always a criminal. Bad rules become a prison. What we see often in psychopathic relationships is an asymmetry. The rules apply to Bob yet not to Mallory. This power imbalance is a sign of something rotten. When the justification for a rule is "Because I said so," it’s a sign of abuse.
When Bob breaks a rule, and often when he does not, Mallory will explode in sudden anger. When Mallory projects sudden anger, it can be dramatic and terrifying. She shifts her body language to look larger, smiles with her teeth bared. She opens her eyes wide. She advances and raises her arms as if to strike. She picks up objects to use as weapons, or to smash on the floor. She raises her voice, shouts a barrage of insults and provocations.
Our emotions are social communication tools. They are a way to negotiate others into behaving with us. They are our original, primeval language, displayed in face and body. Sudden anger defuses and moderates conflicts between individuals. We still have conflicts, yet anger reduces the risk of violence and injury. It lets us make mistakes that could end in conflict, and then step back before we go too far.
This is easy to see. If someone walks in your way on the sidewalk, you sidestep, smile, or nod. The little irritation (a raised eyebrow) turns into a tiny pleasant interaction. You both smile and nod. Take the same two people in two cars, trying to cross each other in a busy intersection. Instead of a polite nod, it can lead to intense sudden anger in both drivers.
What makes the difference is the cage the car forms around the driver. This cuts off verbal and non-verbal communication. It is easier for a car driver and a pedestrian to understand each other than two car drivers. When the brain gets annoyed it starts to show anger. If it gets a response, it calms down. If it gets no response, it moves into "fight or flight" mode. It is the same response you might have if someone walks in your way on the sidewalk, on purpose. Road rage is a basic survival instinct caught in the wrong context.
So the authentic anger display is a social cue. It evolved to tell another person: stop now, I am losing control of myself. It says, violence will happen if you do not step back now. It is a usually-reliable signal that most people cannot fake. The loss of cerebral control is central to the signal’s weight. We can learn to control anger, to calm it or to encourage it. It remains the same authentic mechanism in most people.