Hardly. Sociopaths are not intelligent.
No conscience makes for no limits, not genius.
Are sociopaths intelligent? Geniuses? What sociopaths do in order to con is as old as dirt. Their tactics are similar in concept to what lab rats do to get cheese. They try and try and learn a few tricks to get the cheese. It’s also a bit like a martial art.
Sociopaths use the strengths and weaknesses and the just plain normal of their targeted prey and everyone around them to their own advantage.
Because sociopaths view other people as an opportunity, as a resource…Part of the trouble is that we don’t know we’re being thought of in this way.
This gives them the leading advantage. So in that way, they have “intelligence”… sort of like a spy who knows something you don’t know they know with an intention you aren’t aware of.
Other than that the sociopath (the narcissist) seriously lacks any real intelligence even though people often call narcissists – sociopaths – intelligent or masters of manipulation. The truth is, they’re dumber than boxes of rocks. They’re about as deep as a potato chip.
Sociopaths’ Intelligence
The thing is they exist on a different level than we do. They’re in a primal survival places as parasitic predators. I’ve seen sociopaths behavior as absolutely ridiculous…laughable if it weren’t profoundly harmful. I can’t call them “intelligent” in the way we normally think of “intelligence”…
I see the sociopaths’ so-called intelligence is comparable to learn tricks like frantic lab rats desperate to push the button that brings cheese. More than intelligence it’s an accumulation of “tricks” fused with cunning driven by the desire to survive. It’s animalistic in essence and focus.
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Traits of a Sociopath
We do tend to think of them as “intelligent”, but isn’t this impression or interpretation of them directly linked to them doing things we’d never think of, let alone “do”? Their closed-circuit-world-of-self has no room for genuine intelligence.
I landed on them being described as “cunning” because cunning is fueled by something less elevated than “intelligence”. Cunning lays in a lower level of life-condition, one that’s more simplistic, direct and animalistic. One that’s more self-oriented.
I liken the intelligence of sociopaths to cunning…In part this came to me by observing and experiencing the pet pig that belonged o a friend of mine. This piggy, cute and tiny at first, even soft and cuddly was beloved by my friend.
Deception From Day One
But, the thing is…when anyone takes on a pet pig – marketed as a tea cup or miniature pig -they don’t realize that there’s no such thing. There are pigs, and pigs. What “pig sellers” don’t tell you is that this sweet, tiny piggy, snuggling up as you watch TV on the couch together, will grow bigger. And bigger. And bigger. Because a “tea cup pig” is a farmyard pig.
It will grow to be much, much stronger, harsher, prickly. Then dirty. And stinky. And massively fat. – So here’s the first parallel: if you have a pet pig, you’re living a deception about what the future with this animal will be; you’re deceived about what this animal really is. Same with a sociopath, or that creature you’re calling a narcissist. They are not who or what we think they are.
Pigs sprout a wet, snot-slicked, heaving disc of a snout they use constantly to root, grunt, and grind against anything and everything – including my friend’s leg or any nearby leg – 24-hours a day unless asleep, always looking for food. Perpetually. Relentlessly.
I’ll tell you right now this hard plated skull and snout as it jams into your lower leg hurts incredibly! Just think about 100 pounds of pure skull bored with all the weight of a starving 350-pound animal into your ankle bone.
Calling a Pig and a Sociopath Equally Cunning is Not to Disparage Pigs
Now let’s be clear here: Are pigs sociopaths? No. But sociopaths are pigs. That relentless, primal force of persistence in the face of anything and everything. No other “mode” of operation. In addition, pathological predators are dumb. Ignorant. Conniving. Sneaky. A great pretense of smartness is put forth by them.
Counting On Our Kindness and Soft Hearts
That pig tricked food out of my friend. It stole entire loaves of bread off countertops while my friend made a sandwich, balancing on its hind hooves, grabbing the bread bag with its slimy, little piggy teeth.
It yanked kitchen drawers out of the wall by the handle in his iron clamp of a jaw. Spah-Lllaaaaaahttt! they crashed to the linoleum where piggy-pig snuffled through the contents hoping for a morsel, any crumb to eat; baggies, and aluminum foil flying. Nothing stopped this pig.
When my friend tried to make dinner, the pig routinely knocked into my friend’s legs, causing him to buckle at the knees falling against the edge of the Frigidaire while that pig nabbed goodies: grapes, avocado, tomatoes, strawberries, even ice cubes.
My friend, once again upright, had to devise an alternate route to his own dinner. He developed a method of opening the fridge door, leaving it half-closed on his own arm, then heaving with one foot against the top of the pig’s head groping to grab his own avocado and tofu. Every single night.
A Good Relationship Doesn’t Elicit Terror
My friend was completely terrorized by an animal he’d taken in as a household pet. – His generous, animal-adoring heart was knee-deep in guilt and what some call a trauma-bond which is to say bound up by the soft-pink-innocent-piggy he loved so much.
You ask why not put the pig in another room, or outside while food is being prepared and eaten by the humans in the household..? That pig had broken the door latches on every door inside the house. The doors between the dining room and the kitchen simply wouldn’t shut. Which meant he couldn’t be contained in the kitchen or corralled for subduing.
Added slide bolts were useless. He’d battered the doors until the added slidey-thing-a-mah-jigs popped out of their screws like gum out of a bubble pack. Even any dining chairs wedged underneath the handles in hopes of holding him had caved under his pressure, the legs cracked right off dangling like broken teeth.
If it was left outside in the gorgeous backyard with a full view of the city below to admire, its own personal mud pit to wallow in, and shoots of plants to nibble, all it could seem to do was screech bloody murder. A porcine human-being-murdered-shrieking sound you’d have to hear to believe. – It had to be let back inside before the neighbors called the cops. – This pig owned that house and the people in it.
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Sociopaths are Cunning: Like Pigs
It became an ordinary day that Piggity listened for the front door to open. Raised his snout into the air and sniffed out the booty being carried in from the market.
Heaving and hurling his body into motion, Mr. Pig, ran down the hallway to the foyer, his cloven hooves tappity-scratching, a forewarning of inevitable harm, inspiring dread in the poor human carrying in the groceries. Its rotund, lumbering form clickity-clattered along the bamboo floor at the fastest velocity it could hurtle its 200 pounds, which was shockingly fast.
In a practiced, now ritual gesture it slid to a partial stop as he hit his mark, deftly clamping the brown paper bag from the bottom corner in the steel-vise grip of his yellow, gruesome fang-teeth, yanked backward shifting his massive, quivering weight into his hind-quarters, ripping a gaping wound in the bag: apples, cookies, bananas cascaded in a smacking, tumbling avalanche.
That pig snorted up all it could get its dirty claws and snotty nose on. Single-minded, the top of its metal-plate-of-a-skull bulldozed my friend’s hand out of its way, while screeching and squealing he snarfed up the Oreos, packaging and all. Have you ever heard a pig squeal when you try to take your own Oreos back?
Sociopaths, Narcissists Do Anything to Get What They Want: So Do Pigs
That pig tore up my friend’s bedsheets, pooped, and pissed in the house whenever he felt like it. One fateful day, while my friend got the mail from the street-side mailbox, piggy-piglet adorably (maliciously) slammed the front door shut with his dripping, drooling face, and battleship head. The door slammed and locked. My friend had no keys with him. He was only getting the mail.
To get back into his own home he had to clamber over his own 6” fence. Splinters threaded into his hands as he scrambled up the fence, just shy of breaking an arm when he dropped to the backyard mud. (It used to be grass, but the pig ate it.)
Trust Our Heart of Hearts and Our Gut
In his heart knowing, knowing the pig had done this on purpose. And, for all my friend’s dismay, hurt and sweaty gymnastics, scaling those splintering planks would have been fruitless if the back entries hadn’t been sliding glass doors that the pig couldn’t budge. He was forced to face the fact, after all my friend’s care, love, and generosity towards this pig: That pig tried to kick him out of his own home… And had been waiting for the chance to do it.
Think about it this way: sociopaths have no emotional intelligence since their abnormal, under-functioning brains disallow processing or feeling any emotions other than want, anger, fear, deluded superiority, and glee at getting what they want.
Emotional intelligence is considered – certainly the most useful form of intelligence if not the highest form. We as highly empathetic people have emotional intelligence by the ton.
Thinking a Sociopath is Intelligent Relates to Us Not Knowing What They Are
The pig stood there inside the house, staring out at my friend across the patio entry. It looked up at my flabbergasted, panting, scrapped up, trembling friend – hair tousled, glasses knocked crooked, arms scraped, hands throbbing with wood slivers. His heart, body, and pride had been through the wringer as he reflected on how close he came to breaking his legs or a hip.
That piggy blinked his wire-like, pale lashes with its usual dumb, innocent expression… but, this time my friend saw this fat, pink face also held a warning: The pig had failed in his take-over this time, but there would be the next time. – Except there wasn’t. Because the very next day my friend sent that piggy away to a farm for unwanted, unmanageable pigs. There are apparently many such pigs on many such farms.
Our Empathy Buys Sociopaths Time to Take and Ruin
My friend felt so guilty, he gave that little piglet so many 2nd chances. Oh, that pig knew what he was doing. So do sociopaths. And it’s all riotous improvisation just like with the little piggy. – Snuffling out one opportunity after the next. Never ceasing in the hunt. Leaving us to leap tall fences. – But that’s okay – we’re our own Super Heroes. We are our own Angels. We are awesome!
Pathological Predators Hijack Our Humanity: Shut Down the Candy Store
So a sociopath, like the revolting pig my friend took in as a defenseless, sweet pet (sorry animal lovers) uses our own strengths and weaknesses against us; our normal human gorgeousness – against us. Our own desires for love, a family, a home, a good life – against us.
They are monsters. They aren’t intelligent. Just remorseless. Sociopaths have no wholesome or real emotional connection to us, or to anyone. Not even with that other woman, or that one, or the other one, or two that other guy either.
They Have Pea Brains
We can use the sociopath’s limited brain against them: realize it’s a crime – not a relationship by any means. Know they lie about any and all things. Everything they say or do is to get what they want and not get caught. Understand the meaning behind the stories.
Don’t respond to their emotional harassment and playing sick and sob stories. End the madness that is not a relationship – but a crime asap. Go zero contact and stay there forever. We end it, they won’t. We must reframe the nightmare for a full recovery and to render ourselves sociopath-proof forever.
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