Sociopaths

The more I get all into working and networking online, the more I realise the world is full of of sociopaths. Truth be told, it's not exclusive of the online environment, it's just that you can "appreciate" jerks better if you are online *grin*

Cases of the day:

1. a professional networker, IT folk for a well-known association of professionals, online for several years, acknowledges his lack of emotional intelligence in interacting with people. Yet, he still blames others for "being fake" whenever they emote or introduce some nuances in their conversation, because - listen to this - emoticons "distort" the conversation... the dear guy still thinks we're all cavemen and cavewomen, reasoning in black-or-white terms and getting an autistic reaction out of any minuscule world complexity (ever heard of Freud's defense mechanisms, especially projection, Mr Transactional Analysis Psychobabble? On this very topic, I just blasted a person giving me all that cr*p on transitional objects... Try touching a flame without a transitional object and let's see if you get burn and call it being smart, *ssh*l*!);

2. another professional, namely a network-centric one, builds a group up in a wonderful way, like a marvellous lab experiment, just to shut it down because - I suspect - the group developed a shared vision and leadership and could go on without him... in fact, he doesn't accept to transfer the group ownership, period.

From all of this we can gather some cosmic laws:

A. whatever a person proports to be, don't believe him/her UNLESS you have some direct evidence suggesting that s/he indeed knows what s/he means;
B. no matter how intelligent an idea sounds like, the voice that reveals it to the world can still belong to the most inconsistent and unaware of the human beings (that's the beauty of life!);
C. do not confuse the message with the messenger: just because the idea is good, it doesn't mean the messenger is as well;
D. Carl Rogers was DEAD WRONG when he said that anybody could reach their full potential, some people can not, because they prefer to be a slave to their limitations and fears, which they name, respectively, "myself" and "my opinions" and treasure above anything else;
E. some people approach work as they would approach the primordial broth: shove everything that there is IN, inject some sparkles into it and hope to make a living out of it;
F. Life without the power of observation switched on is not very different from vegetative state and coma: either you shake it away, or euthanasia is an option.

That's why, in all of this, I stand firm in my preferring the humble, the marginalized, the "underserved": because there is more dignity in acknowledging the limitation that life, society and God put on you (and that we ALL have, like it or not -- despite Seligman's positive thinking BLABBING) than there is in pretending to be smarter than one is.