The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Sociopathic Monsters: ‘Heroic Hatred’

Posted on | December 27, 2012 | 32 Comments

In September, Ladd Ehlinger Jr. published “A Breathtaking Lack of Empathy,” an attempt to explain Neal Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies:

He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

This dehumanization of his targets — viewing them as objects — is characteristic of the sociopath, and Rauhauser’s delight in playing “conflict cupid” (inciting others to attack his targets) displays the sadistic aspect of his warped personality. Ehlinger noted Rauhauser’s aptitude for recruiting similarly deviant characters to assist him in his malicious projects. Among Neal’s most persistent henchpeople is “Occupy Rebellion,” who recently decided to share this in the comments at a pro-Kimberlin site (which I won’t link, for obvious reasons):

We have every single right to mock Andrew Breitbart and any other Breitbart trash who dies. Since THEY are the ones who mock people’s deaths every single day. . . . Andrew Breitbart was a career criminal who made it his mission to destroy people & their families. . . .
NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever claim their “victims” of anything. NO ONE linked to Breitbart has the right to ever “grieve” for anyone they know who died. NO ONE CARES. We should only “grieve” if it’s Breitbart trash who dies but not for anyone else??

Here you have someone utterly dehumanizing not only the late Andrew Breitbart, but also anyone who ever associated with him.

This is how damaged people become monsters: They externalize their inner feelings of worthlessness as hatred of demonized scapegoats, whom they construct in their own minds as symbols of wrong, so that doing evil to the scapegoat is (in their twisted thinking) an act of righteousness. In the perverted mind of the obsessive sociopath, hatred of the scapegoat is thereby endowed with a heroic quality.

The peculiar “heroic hatred” directed at Andrew Breitbart by these monsters is not merely the product of politics, but rather an obverse reflection of their own damaged egos: Breitbart was famous and successful; they are obscure failures; his fame and success must therefore be re-imagined by them as unjust and symbolically evil.

What is striking — and, in a weird ironic way, a tribute to Breitbart’s greatness — is how this obsessive hatred has persisted even after Breitbart’s death, so that now Rauhauser, “Occupy Rebellion” and others (most of them involved with the “Weiner Truther” cult) have transferred their “heroic hatred” to Breitbart’s associates.

Trapped inside their own self-justifying delusions, and huddling online among those who share their strange obsessions, these monsters are incapable of understanding how drastically abnormal their hateful attitudes and actions really are.

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Category: Andrew Breitbart

Comments

  • Monitor2112

    It is a truly shocking thing to watch from the outside. Seeing this venomous hatred spewed toward people such as yourself Mr. McCain, or William Hoge, or Patrick Frey or Lee Stranahan or Aaron Walker, is like passing by an accident. You don’t want to look but are oddly compelled to.

  • SDN

    “Every civilized man has a core of barbarism to which he can, at need, revert, and then return to being civilized when the need has passed. Your counterparts had no civilized core to fall back on. The difference was quite striking.” – Commander Spock, “Mirror, Mirror”

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  • EasyA

    That doesn’t help at all. Elaborate a bit on the context of the quote and how it is relevant to what McCain wrote….

  • Quartermaster

    You need to drop and consider the quote rather than just run off at the keyboard. The application is self evident if you go back through what RSm has written on this subject in the past. Then you’ll see the context. The quote is spot on here.

  • wanderer

    Pointing out how they make a habit of dehumanizng their opposition (true) while repeatedly referring to them as “monsters” (also true) may be perceived as a bit…hypocritical. Or something.

    They’re not monsters. There are no such thing as monsters. They’re people, and we have to come to terms with the fact that they’re PEOPLE who need to be dealt with by all means necessary and available, without attempting to assuage our consciences by reducing them to anything less.

    I know I’ll probably get called a troll for this, but that’s fine. I only point it out because some ACTUAL troll is sure to come along and snark about it, and I’d rather you heard it from someone who appreciates your blog first.

  • Anamika

    Yes,I can see a connection haha but really Qm, I think Neal is a little more wild than Spock.

    My kind of man (both of them, even if I prefer men with thick long hair)

  • Anamika

    I can recall at least 5 wingnut sites on the top of my head where people get to dehumanize liberals on a daily basis. There are several such cases of hate on this blog too. But that doesn’t count!

  • robertstacymccain

    In fact, I’ve made an extraordinary effort to understand these people. They are monsters because of the inhuman acts they do — their cyberstalking, etc. — and the attempt to explain why they do it begins with this mystery: How do human beings turn themselves into such monsters of inhuman cruelty?

    It’s like trying to explain the actions of a mass murderer. What they have done is so bizarre — so far off the scale of ordinary human behavior — that most people simply cannot fathom such evil. Yet it is important to see these monsters as the far end of a continuum, and to understand how they reached their destination by traveling a road of irresponsibilitiy, beginning with small excuses for failure and then repeatedly doubling down until their entire existence, their very reason for being, became defined by the “heroic hatred” of those they irrationally blamed for their own unhappiness and misfortunes.
    We cannot honestly say, “There but for the grace of God go I,” because most of us lack the extreme obsessive traits necessary to becoming a Neal Rauhauser, an “Occupy Rebellion” or a Bill Schmalfeldt. Nevertheless, we can see the blame-shifting and scapegoating at work in the process, and learn to avoid these psychological crutches.

  • wanderer

    Do us both a favor dearie, and admit your side’s every bit as guilty of the same behavior. It’s pervasive on both sides of the divide.

    The difference is, I’d rather see our side try to rise above it. I’ve rarely if ever seen any such suggestion by your people. I’d rather we took pride in approaching questions of opposing views with some degree of logic rather than trying to duplicate the emotional insanity of your fever swamps.

    Maybe that’s wishful thinking. I believe we’ll know for sure in the very near future, for good or bad.

  • robertstacymccain

    The “look away” reaction can be dangerous. People like to think that it can never happen to them, that they can never be victimized by the kind of evil that has menaced Seth Allen, Patterico, Mandy Nagy, Mike Stack, Aaron Walker, Lee Stranahan and others. And I ignored it (in fact, I was unaware of it) for many months, not realizing how Rauhauser’s Weinergate obsession (and Neal’s association with Brett Kimberlin) had spawned a relentless campaign of harassment, until Walker published his 28,000-word account in May. Since then, I’ve gained a quite direct empathy for the plight of the victims.

  • wanderer

    I agree that their acts are monstrous, but I don’t agree they’re monsters. Maybe I’m splitting hairs; but I happen to believe a reckoning is very near, and whatever comes next, I want it understood that they’re people.

    If not for the sake of mercy, then for the sake of example. “People” aren’t allowed to behave that way and remain among other people. They can’t use the excuse that they’re “monsters” because we won’t grant them the title. They made a choice, *as people*, to treat other people in a way that made them anathema.

    I admit that I haven’t been the target of their twisted affections to anywhere near the degree you have, so I don’t have the same emotional investment. I certainly couldn’t blame you for it, and I’d probably agree if I were in the same boat.

  • http://twitter.com/FilmLadd Film Ladd

    “wingnut sites”

  • http://www.facebook.com/eric.ashley.58 Eric Ashley

    By drawing the line here, you’re helping to make something like Bloody Kansas not happen. Or at worst, lowering the probability of such.

  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    Some people just need to be horse whipped. Often.

  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    Anamika: How about some examples and links? Where are these hateful “wingnut sites”?

  • Quartermaster

    Nah! Libtards dehumanize themselves. The people that RSM is talking about have done the same by taking themselves beyond the pale. No one sent them there, they went themselves, by a choice of their own free will. As Adam Smith put it “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
    It’s foolish to say that their acts are monstrous but they aren’t monsters. Tney may be lesser monsters than, say, Stalin or Mao, but monsters they are because they are sociopaths as Stalin and Mao were. They just don’t have the power those two had. I have no doubt that if they did have the same power they would do just as badly as they did.

  • Quartermaster

    Are you on your meds this morning? That response makes as much sense as thinking Stalin was a great humanitarian or Eichmann loved Jews.

  • Quartermaster

    Tut, tut! Anamika. You are so far left that anyone slightly to the right of Mao is a wingnut. Consequently, you have utterly no basis for comparison within yourself. Like the all libtards, anyone not agreeing with your insanity is inhuman.
    Yes, insanity. I completely agree with Churcfhill when he said that anyone who is not conservative by the time they are 40 has no brain. Milady, 40 or not, you fall into that category.

  • Monitor2112

    I was only tangentially aware of it until just before Aaron Walkers major post. I had read Mandy’s article, I had read Patterico’s site, I just didn’t really “lock on” to what was happening until later. Since then I have followed every development.

  • Mike Stack
  • Quartermaster

    Martin Niemoller comes to mind at this point: “First they came for the ….”
    Yes, it’s very dangerous to simply look away and hope they take your buddy instead of you. That’s not why we have buddies.

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    We’re endorsing fiscal responsibilty, personal responsibility to include an obligation to act in our own self-defense, an obligation to give to the community more than we take from it and acknowlede that there is a an absolute and higher moral standard than our own self-indulgence.

    They’re endorsing killing babies and getting free shit.

    We’re the wingnuts.

  • http://twitter.com/richard_mcenroe richard mcenroe

    “I don’t have to be faster than the wolves, I just have to be faster than you…”

  • Quartermaster

    Sure seems self evident to me.

  • Dandapani

    It’s all projection. “Accuse the accuser” is just another form.

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  • http://www.FiveFeetOfFury.com/ Kathy Shaidle
  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    If buttercups buzz’d after the bee
    If boats were on land, churches on sea
    If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows
    And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse
    If the mamas sold their babies
    To the Gypsies for half a crown
    If summer were spring
    And the other way ’round
    Then all the world would be upside down!

  • http://profiles.google.com/rob5136 Rob Crawford

    “whatever comes next, I want it understood that they’re people”

    Yes, so we apply a correlation of the Golden Rule. The way they treat people is the way they wish to be treated.

  • Gunga

    Since when can human beings not be monsters? Hitler wasn’t a monster? Stalin? Mao? Ask a Cambodian refugee if Pol Pot wasn’t a monster. You think Charles Manson isn’t a monster? John Wayne Gacy? Merriam Webster online includes: “something monstrous; especially : a person of unnatural or extreme ugliness, deformity, wickedness, or cruelty.” Yes…I did go there…wickedly cruel fact monster that I am…

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