The Psychopath’s Bible: For the Extreme Individual by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D. with Dr. Jack Willis (1994, New Falcon Publications)
A true Black Book if there ever was one. The basic contention of the authors is that most religions don’t encourage the individual but rather use up the individual to further the goals of the collective. Unable to work on developing the self, religions hold back enlightenment. This book—both a social philosophy and a technique—will help the individual develop not only the self but what it claims to be the best part of the self—the Psychopath. It warns the reader that the book is evil but, as Ben Franklin once said, if God created everything then God created evil too. All cultures celebrate evil as we do with our Halloween. The evil is in us and it is not going anywhere so we invent these holidays to acknowledge it and let it out as a kind of safety valve.
I have personally always believed that all of us are psychopathic to an extent and this book agrees and instead of trying to stifle or sublimate that side of us, it seeks to instead liberate it. It teaches the individual to become a “Toxick Magician.” Nicholas Tharcher, who authored the book’s foreword, describes the Toxick Magician as someone who “is not afraid to be
deliberately malicious and malevolent. From society’s standpoint, he is the worst of the psychopaths because he does his Work
intentionally.” Above all, he is FREE—mainly from delusions that cloud the thinking of
homo normalis. He maintains anonymity while plotting the downfall of everyone around him.
Tharcher also makes the interesting observation about the bible of psychiatry known as the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) or DSM-IV. Tharcher writes:
If you’ve never picked up DSM-IV, we strongly recommend that you do so. You’ll find yourself in it. You’ll find your friends and associates in it. You’ll find your family members in it. Indeed, you’ll find everybody in it. In other words, from the point of view of psychiatry, everyone has a “mental disorder.” For psychiatry, there is no such thing as mental health, only types and degrees of pathology.
Some of what I read in this book is close to the dadaist philosophy expressed a little differently. Dada taught that wars are useless for anything other than spreading around the very thing it has declared war on and it doesn’t matter if it is war on poverty, on racism, on sexism, on abortion, on capitalism, on saving the ecology, on war itself. PB teaches that such wars bring about Toxick Chaos that opposes the actions of the party that has declared war. For example, a war on abortion will only result in over population that inevitably leads to a rejection of the anti-abortion sentiment and will destroy the ones who declared the war. The animal rights activists who declared war on the fur trade anonymously slash up hundreds if not thousands of fur coats as a protest which accomplishes nothing but forcing the fur coat manufacturers to have to slaughter yet more animals to make up for the coats that were uselessly destroyed. More animals have died rather than less.
The book takes a brutal position that the human race’s loftiest goals are but ruses and farces of destruction, stupidity and mediocrity. The book asserts that “all goals reduce to control” and “[l]earn how to help everyone achieve what they want. It will, in the end, destroy them.” Hence the goal of the Toxick Magician is simply to sow the seeds of destruction by helping others achieve their goals. A true psychopath learns to disguise his contempt of his fellow humans by appearing to be one of them—he goes to church, helps a stranded motorist, gets married and raises children but he is NOT a human being. This is done “for the good of the gross force field which is forever struggling to give birth to new life forms as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost to the older forms.”
The Toxick Magician is a Manipulator and a Manipulator always gets what he or she wants by disguising it as a lofty goal. This is the reason a white collar criminal who robs his clients of millions of dollars spends less time in prison than a guy who held up a gas station and took off with $50. European kings declared the triumph of Christendom which earned the adulation of the Christian masses who didn’t give a f-uck that it was achieved by slaughtering thousands of pagans, “witches” and druids and taking their land. The same was done in the United States by declaring “Manifest Destiny” as the goal—the god-given right to expand—by killing off Indians and herding the survivors onto wastelands (until the white man decided he wanted those as well). There is no difference, for example, between the doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the goal of global literacy. The result is the spread of illiteracy. Since knowledge is power, illiteracy is the guarantee of powerlessness. Why would the few Manipulators at the top want everybody to be as powerful as them? Where is the fun in that? And to prevent the intelligentsia from conspiring against them and overthrowing them, the Manipulators developed the goal of “tenure” which has effectively neutered the intelligentsia and turned them into compliant work beasts. That’s why they will do anything to help the intelligentsia attain and maintain this goal—because it actually destroys them and preserves the Manipulators’ power. Never miss a chance to destroy others who are not useful to you as allies by helping them to destroy themselves. Be an enabler and help others destroy themselves—that’s control.
A true Toxick Magician also understands his place on the food chain. A pretender always thinks he’s at the top of it all but a true Manipulator knows he is just food to someone else. He accepts this and controls how much of himself he allows to be eaten. He does not want to stand out. As Dylan once so sagely put it: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” Know how to do that and don’t fight it or you will only damage yourself and badly. As an example, I was once telling my father (a Navy veteran) how much I hated certain people in the Navy who outranked me and that I was not inclined to recognize their authority or follow their orders and didn’t care what they thought or did as a result. My father said, “Don’t try to rebel and have things your way because you know it won’t work and all you’re gonna do is make some sonofabitch’s day.” I realized he was right. I was helping them to destroy me. The smart thing to do was to never give them that satisfaction and I did a complete 180. They knew I hated them and that I wanted them to hate me with a burning, smoldering passion but I was strictly by the book from that point on about everything and so there was nothing they could do about it except wait for me to slip up, which I never did. In this way, I triumphed over them. “You are your own end. You are not the means to anyone else’s end. However, it is wise to let others believe you are a means to their ends.”
The problem is we come into the world as infants and are treated as such our entire lives. The authors call this “infantilizing.” As children, we fear the dark, we fear the bogey man, we fear the monster in the closet and under the bed, we fear mommy and daddy catching us doing something bad. The fear never leaves us but just gets applied to other things because, we tell ourselves, we’re adults now and we know better than to believe in that kid stuff. The kid stuff is the fear itself. Otherwise it is translated over to fear of sickness, fear of taxes, fear of unemployment/bankruptcy, fear of old age, fear of crime, fear of government, fear of lack of government, fear of life, fear of death, etc. Fear is irrational but we won’t admit this because we want to be infantilized. We want government to take care of us but we fear that it may know too much about us. We fear crime so we bury ourselves under firearms which has done nothing but increase the crime rate a thousand-fold (remember, whatever we try to stop we only perpetuate in reality). Doctors and dentists push people to get surgeries they don’t need because people allow doctors to be the adults in the doctor-patient relationship.
At some point somewhere, however, we get to assume the adult role. Maybe we are a supervisor at work and people have to answer to us (even though someone over us made us that supervisor). Maybe we are a parent. Dr. Hyatt states, “The entire structure of the world is a food chain of infantilizing.” We get to play parent and child depending on the circumstances. We use fear on others and have others use it on us. The Toxick Magician understands this and plays up on the fear in order to force things to fall apart because that’s when the Toxick Magician is then at his most toxic. He will go about forging connections and making allies through a combination of fear and deceit.
He does this because:
The psychopath acknowledges that he is born a fool and is living in an insane asylum. He does not seek to make sense of the senseless, he does not look to find reason in chaos. Being convinced that those around him are nuts, he commits to the law of the self rather than the blatherings of the herd.
The book is full of strange, little exercises as:
“[D]isplease someone you really like, and please someone you really can’t stand. Write down your actions and their reactions in your journal.”
“Watch three sitcoms a month…… Now! you know what people value and what they compare themselves to…… Count their lies, their assumptions, their social tricks, how they inculcate values and ideals in the viewer. Record a few different sitcoms and begin to break them down. Notice how they use laughter to get the audience to accept their implicit values.”
The book does not recommend the use of violence. It differentiates between the psychopath and the sociopath. The sociopath will resort to violence to get what he or she wants. The psychopath simply but knowingly gives those around them who are of no other use to them enough rope by which they will inevitably hang themselves.