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April 23, 2015 - Davis Aurini
12:43
Movie Review: The Thief (1997) 3 of 3

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0124207/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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The Dark Triad and the Psychopath.
Now the Dark Triad, as I've mentioned before, it's traditionally viewed as being composed of three traits.
Psychopathy, Narcissism, and Machiavellianism.
However, if you've watched any of my old psychology videos, you know that I have very strict definitions for what all of these things are.
And I think it's worth revisiting these definitions and then asking what exactly the Dark Triad really is all about.
So the psychopath, the psychopath is somebody that can't stop manipulating things, that views everything as a zero-sum game, that isn't able to place any emotional value on anything.
This is a person who will cheat at cards when there's no stakes whatsoever.
You know, they just cheat and manipulate constantly because they don't know what they're doing.
They have no direction, no purpose in their life aside from manipulating them.
And Tolshan in The Thief was the absolute perfect example of a psychopath.
In fact, he's even better than Hannibal Lecter because Hannibal Lecter is a little bit blown up.
He's a little bit of a cartoon character because of all the murdering that he gets up to.
Whereas the real psychopath will be perfectly willing to commit murder.
And Toljan probably has killed a couple of people at some point in his history.
But they don't feel a compulsion towards violence.
It's just another tool.
And they will use any tool at any time.
They just have no direction where they're going with any of this.
Now the narcissist is a very distinct thing from the psychopath.
They are just as destructive as a psychopath is, but they're distinct in very certain ways.
See, whereas the psychopath has no affect, where they have no emotions, the narcissist is nothing but emotions.
Shame and rage.
Just this black little ball, this singularity of hatred and evil with an event horizon of a personality.
Now again, we're living in a very narcissistic era.
Narcissism is the mental disorder of the day.
And I personally suspect that there's the true narcissists and the affected narcissists.
Many people behave like narcissists, along with the rage that you can trigger if you actually pierce their shell.
But this is more of an environmental thing.
They could, in theory, get better.
Whereas the true narcissist, it's impossible to say what's underneath that personality, if there is anything at the center of it, because it really becomes an event horizon.
It's like an infinite onion of shells.
And any time one of the shells gets broken, they will lash out violently until they hit a reset button.
So because the narcissist is so full of rage and shame, they demand constant attention, constant approval.
And so whereas the psychopath will constantly manipulate things for no reason whatsoever, the narcissist will constantly lie for no reason whatsoever.
You know, if they got second place in a chess tournament, say, that's something worth bragging about.
They'll lie and say they got first place.
They will make up stories even though you were there and witnessed it happening differently.
They are so desperate to construct the shell persona to keep their attention diverted from their inner self-loathing that they constantly are reinventing and making it up.
So whereas the psychopath is going to be constantly manipulating everybody around them, they're going to be a puppet master with absolutely no plan where any of it's going, the narcissist is going to be more of the cult leader, demanding that you agree with them all the time, that your memory must be faulty, that you need to follow them and do everything that they say.
Both very destructive, both are very charming in a certain way, because the narcissist has control of everything.
Sorry, the psychopath has control of everything.
He doesn't really.
But all of us would like somebody to be in charge.
We want somebody to take responsibility for things.
You know, even at the most basic level, traffic lights, for example.
You know, I want to know that there's somebody down in City Hall, some civic engineer that's making sure the traffic is flowing as efficiently as it possibly can.
You know, I don't want to get blindsided by a car because they forgot to put a stop sign there.
And we don't even think about that.
We want somebody else in control of certain things.
And so the psychopath gives us that sort of comfort.
The narcissist, meanwhile, gives us meaning.
Because this is another thing that people crave in their lives, is meaning because there's so little of it.
If you don't create your own meaning, somebody else is going to give it to you.
But, you know, even then, no man is an island.
You can't create all of your meaning.
Understanding who your parents were, what your country stands for, what history you came from, what sort of ethics and values you follow.
You know, we can derive these to a certain extent ourselves.
But we also need to get them from somewhere else.
So somebody that's lonely and isolated is going to tend to go for a narcissist, somebody that will tell them the meaning of everything, that will even rewrite events.
Oh no, you didn't remember it correctly.
I remembered it correctly.
This is the meaning.
And even though the meaning shifts, if you're that hungry for meaning, any port in the storm.
And finally, Machiavellianism.
Now the thing is that both the narcissist and the psychopath can be described as Machiavellian because they're very manipulative.
The psychopath is manipulative in a legalistic sense, in an organizational sense.
He tells everyone what they're going to be doing.
Whereas the narcissist is very manipulative in the emotional sense.
He figures out what your emotional need is and then manipulates you accordingly.
And yet Machiavellianism is actually a rather value-neutral term.
You see, the Machiavellianism, practicality is something that every soldier has to learn.
In fact, by the end of the film, we see that that's the one thing that Sonia has learned.
He's learned to be Machiavellian, to be in control of circumstances, to know what his desires are, and to go out in the world and affect things in such a way that he gets the results he wants.
This is actually a huge part of masculinity.
And this is probably what it is about the psychopath and the narcissist that makes them so attractive.
Because the narcissist is completely, he doesn't actually have any value.
He does not have any purpose to him.
But he feels like he does because he's Machiavellian.
And the same thing for the psychopath.
He has no plan whatsoever.
You know, Toljan in the movie is just going from town to town.
He has no plans to stay with Katya and Sonia.
He just keeps them around as long as they're convenient, as long as he has a use for them, and as long as they're there.
You know, if he had a strategy, if he had a long-term goal, he might throw them away after a couple of towns because he said, well, this scam's getting old.
I'm going to get caught by the MPs eventually.
I need to switch it up.
You know, if he were actually just pure Machiavellian, he might do something like that.
But no, he keeps them around and keeps using them because they won't leave.
He has to use every tool he has, even when it doesn't make sense.
And so Machiavellianism, I think you can really equate that with the masculinity that Sonia discovers.
That Machiavellianism is being mature and rational.
In fact, properly employed, you're not going to be a thief because a thief is going to get you sent to Siberia.
It's going to catch up with you eventually.
I mean, how many crimes would not be committed if people were just a little bit smarter and if they thought a little bit further down the road?
You know, crime is just something that pays in the short term and costs in the long term.
Whereas Machiavellianism is about, it's, yes, tactics, manipulation, but also strategy.
Where am I going long term?
You know, do I need to use this tool now or is this tool going to hurt me in the long term?
So equating the dark triad to all three of these things, I feel it's really missing the point.
First of all, because psychopathy and narcissism are two utterly different things.
They're as unalike as you can be, but they are both very destructive and very manipulative.
But the reason that the dark triad, the reason that gets you all the women now is again, that low trust society.
See, all of these rooms that Toljan kept renting, let's say, rather than a noble soldier, let's say that an honest carpenter showed up and said, you know what?
Listen, I don't have a lot of money, but I'll try my best to have rent on time each month.
I'm really dedicated to it.
I'm sorry, I have a kid, but he's not too noisy.
I'll make sure that guy's not going to get a room rented to.
That guy's going to be like, oh, get out of here, you deadbeat.
You don't have money.
Even though he would at least try as hard as he could to pay during these dark times.
Tolshan?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
You know how the army is.
They're just a little bit behind on their paperwork right now.
But I'll be getting the housing allowance soon.
Again, in the low trust society, because people think they're getting scammed constantly, the other side of that coin is that they want somebody that's perfectly honest.
They want that person that promises that, oh, I'll never scam you.
I'll love you forever, baby.
You know, I'll don't worry.
I'm a millionaire.
That's why I'm renting a room because I'm a millionaire.
And so that's the person that winds up getting rented to, as opposed to the person that would make honest, genuine efforts to be a decent person.
Same in the job market, same in the dating market.
Welcome to this foul year of our Lord 2015.
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