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Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

psyche.co

191–200 of 231 posts

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, that "Mother Teresa" is a generic term for the epitome of saintly altruism, but the truth of the matter is that she was a fraudulent self promotor who glorified the suffering of others, claimed poverty and disease were gifts from God that build character, and who Christopher Hitchens described as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," and called "The Ghoul of Calcutta". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cri…

Why is enduring poverty not helping the world? Poverty = less resources = less pollution/damage to environment. There is only so much a poor person in Africa or Indian village can do to hurt the environment compared to a person in West probably producing 20x the greenhouse gases.

Reducing poverty helps the world, not enduring poverty. And fetishizing OTHER PEOPLE enduring poverty, instead of helping those people OUT of poverty, and working to REDUCE poverty, is a clear sign of an extremely dark personality, especially when you accept millions of dollars from terrible dictators to white-wash their reputations, to enrich yourself and your own reputation.

If Mother Teresa was so anti-poverty, and anti-greenhouse gasses, and anti-pollution, and anti-environmental damage (which she was not), then explain why she's also anti-birth control (which she was)? Isn't it much more effective to address those problems by controlling the population with condoms and birth control pills and vasectomies and even voluntary safe legal abortions, than to have so many poor sick people suffering and stressing the medical system and spreading diseases, forcing them to live in poverty (which Mother Teresa fetishized) to only slightly reduce all those environmental problems (that Mother Teresa didn't actually care about), while also causing many other problems, like all those decaying bodies floating in the Ganges and all that raw sewage?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/1/14/dead-bodies-found-f...

https://www.planetcustodian.com/over-50-scary-images-depicti...

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#192
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studying history will teach you this. The most successful leaders go around committing morally ambiguous but advatangeous acts that can be spun into a good story (or at least a story the general population at the time would've bought into). Sometimes just straight up atrocities if they can get away with it. It is not much different today. The US has a department of Defense, which flies death robots around in impoveri…

If we had an actual Department of Defense, we wouldn't need Homeland Security. What we have is a relabeled War Department but that would have sounded silly after a war. To wit, winning is all about framing the argument in the right way. Victors get to rewrite history not just because they won but because we want a world in which good guys do well.

> Victors get to rewrite history

Robert McNamara makes a great point about that in fantastic documentary The Fog of War.

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, that "Mother Teresa" is a generic term for the epitome of saintly altruism, but the truth of the matter is that she was a fraudulent self promotor who glorified the suffering of others, claimed poverty and disease were gifts from God that build character, and who Christopher Hitchens described as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," and called "The Ghoul of Calcutta". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cri…

Your comment seems more about Christopher Hitchens than about Mother Teresa. Are we supposed to be shocked that the poster boy for anti-theism disliked Mother Teresa?

As I said in my other response, no it's not about Christopher Hitchens, and why are you also trying to make it about being shocked by him, instead of being shocked by what Mother Teresa actually did? Why do you too try to deny the facts, while shifting the blame to one of her accusers, without providing any evidence that his accusations are inaccurate or unfair?

It's such a shame how people with dark personality traits always crawl out of the woodwork to baselessly defend and whitewash the actions of other "successful" self-aggrandizing people with even darker personality traits.

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Does high agreeableness necessarily translate into more empathy I think the difference is that the personality trait called "agreeableness" doesn't mean someone is a pushover. But I do agree with you in general, my biggest gripe with pop psych as of late is the way "empathy" is used interchangeably with being nice. Has a quiet person failed to empathize if there is no change in their outward behavior? I'd say obviou…

> I've been trying to work out why we talk about empathy when we mean being nice. Somewhat many people aren't "good" at feeling empathy, and some brains are 100% incapable -- and maybe they cannot see any difference between empathy and faked niceness.

[deleted]

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So true, that "Mother Teresa" is a generic term for the epitome of saintly altruism, but the truth of the matter is that she was a fraudulent self promotor who glorified the suffering of others, claimed poverty and disease were gifts from God that build character, and who Christopher Hitchens described as "a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud," and called "The Ghoul of Calcutta". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cri…

Why is enduring poverty not helping the world? Poverty = less resources = less pollution/damage to environment. There is only so much a poor person in Africa or Indian village can do to hurt the environment compared to a person in West probably producing 20x the greenhouse gases.

What's so chilling about you and Mother Teresa is that you're arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment, when they're not the ones flying around in private airplanes, like Mother Teresa was.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725

>Climate change: Global 'elite' will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles

>The world's wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, according to the UN.

Mother Teresa even killed five innocent people (including two children) with her airplane and jet-set self-promoting high-carbon lifestyle!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-12-mn-2986-s...

>DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — A small plane carrying Nobel laureate Mother Teresa skidded into the crowd seeing her off Saturday and killed five people, Radio Tanzania said. No one on the plane was hurt. [...]

>Sister Celina, speaking by telephone from the hospital at Dodoma, the nearest town, identified the dead as Sister Clarapia of India, two boys ages 12 and 14, and two men, one of whom ran a center for lepers at the Hombolo mission.

https://www.tzaffairs.org/1987/01/tanzania-in-the-internatio...

>Mother Teresa, aged 76, escaped unhurt when a light aircraft she was travelling in slewed off the rough airstrip at Hombolo near Dodoma on October 12th, 1986. Five people in the crowd lining the airstrip were killed. According to the Times, “The dead were two boys aged 8 and 12, sister Serena, an Indian missionary nun, the director of a leprosy centre, and another Tanzanian man. The pilot, Mr Rolf Klemenson, a Norwegian, said the plane slewed off the runway as it was gathering speed for take-off and he was unable to lift it over the crowd. Two were injured by the propellers of the plane and at least one of the dead was decapitated. Mother Theresa subsequently attended the funeral of sister Serena. She was deeply affected by the tragedy, saying: “My coming is behind this accident.” She at first said that she would abandon the rest of her tour, but later decided to continue and flew to Tabora, where she attended a ceremony at which seven members of her Missionary Sisters of Charity took their first vows.”

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is enduring poverty not helping the world? Poverty = less resources = less pollution/damage to environment. There is only so much a poor person in Africa or Indian village can do to hurt the environment compared to a person in West probably producing 20x the greenhouse gases.

What's so chilling about you and Mother Teresa is that you're arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment, when they're not the ones flying around in private airplanes, like Mother Teresa was. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725 >Climate change: Global 'elite' will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles >The world's wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the combined c…

It's hard to pick a side when headstrong interpretations win out over likely truth. The jesus-like dream of truth died before I was born and now we're left with people choosing their own interpretations.

The article you linked under the shocking line 'Mother Teresa killed five with her plane', describes an incident where a plane was crowded around and unable to get airborn. Five people took the brunt of the propellers. No part of that is directly Mother Teresa's fault and you have to work hard to ignore the pilot's actions and everybody on the ground.

It isn't hard to find the truth for what it likely is, through research and a charitable view. Society has determined that using headstrong fear to ram your own interpretation through is better than the past and I weep everyday for what we have lost. This used to be a good planet, now every single marginally positive outcome must be torn from history and context to be presented as the evil "it is". Shame on you. I'm so tired of the politics du-jour shitting on 2k years of successful history. You can lie about the present, and the past won't go away.

Everybody who thinks they have a modicum of intelligence and still accepts balongia like these hellish recasts of the past deserves their inability to tell truth from fiction.

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so chilling about you and Mother Teresa is that you're arguing that the poor should suffer to help the world and the environment, when they're not the ones flying around in private airplanes, like Mother Teresa was. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725 >Climate change: Global 'elite' will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles >The world's wealthiest 1% account for more than twice the combined c…

It's hard to pick a side when headstrong interpretations win out over likely truth. The jesus-like dream of truth died before I was born and now we're left with people choosing their own interpretations. The article you linked under the shocking line 'Mother Teresa killed five with her plane', describes an incident where a plane was crowded around and unable to get airborn. Five people took the brunt of the propeller…

Mother Teresa chose to fly to Dar es Salaam not to help the poor, but to "attended the consecretion Monday of seven nuns of her Missionaries of Charity order".

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

You are as quick to forgive her of any responsibility for her voluntary actions of self-promotion and religious indoctrination, as wolfretcrap was to condemn the poor for the responsibility of their mere existence on the environment.

https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b

She even had the nerve to make the self-aggrandizing claim that it was a miracle of God that she survived (another notch in her campaign for sainthood), but failed to mention that God decided to kill those five people (horribly decapitating some of them with the propellers), including two children, while sparing her. Thanks, God!

All this proves my point in this discussion that Mother Teresa is a textbook example of someone with an extremely dark personality, who was so good at and focused on self promotion, that she managed to conceal that fact that she's a sociopath, and fool people into thinking she was a saint, and literally bending the rules to grant her sainthood after her death.

The fact that she wasn't personally piloting the private plane she chartered (and that wouldn't have been there otherwise) which killed five people, or that one particular person like Christopher Hitchens who justifiably and correctly criticized her was an anti-theist, or alcoholic, or gay, or a jerk, doesn't detract from the uncontested proven facts, man.

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#199
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying most conservative Catholics fetishize poverty and suffering as much as Mother Teresa did? That's a harsh wide brush. If you don't know if the criticism of Mother Teresa is legit, then you can easily find out for yourself by clicking on the link to the wikipedia page I gave you, reading it critically, and looking at the citations. No need to trust me, or ask me to prove to you what's already so well doc…

> Are you saying most conservative Catholics fetishize poverty and suffering as much as Mother Teresa did? I doubt they meant that, but not many have any idea how terrible a person she was: > “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion,” Mother Teresa said. “The world gains much from their suffering.” https://allthatsinteresting.com/mother-teresa-saint/2

My point is that he must have meant that, for his argument to make any sense. I agree he probably didn't mean that, and that his argument is nonsense. He admits he didn't even bother researching and evaluating the evidence, then he jumps to an invalid conclusion, that there's nothing shocking about Mother Teresa's behavior, only Christopher Hitchens' criticism of it.

Re: Are people with dark personality traits more likely to succeed?

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to pick a side when headstrong interpretations win out over likely truth. The jesus-like dream of truth died before I was born and now we're left with people choosing their own interpretations. The article you linked under the shocking line 'Mother Teresa killed five with her plane', describes an incident where a plane was crowded around and unable to get airborn. Five people took the brunt of the propeller…

Mother Teresa chose to fly to Dar es Salaam not to help the poor, but to "attended the consecretion Monday of seven nuns of her Missionaries of Charity order". https://apnews.com/article/56dc5fdab8fcf949ee6dc4a4f4e9947b You are as quick to forgive her of any responsibility for her voluntary actions of self-promotion and religious indoctrination, as wolfretcrap was to condemn the poor for the responsibility of their m…

God is an absolute, the source of all. The concept includes being responsible for the death of people in unfortunate circumstances. I don't see the idea that you are somehow above God because you identified that some people died in unfortunate circumstances.

I don't "forgive her". I say there is a truth you have thrown under a bus. She didn't self promote, she was serving a purpose under a larger story. People suffering and someone being unable to fix it, doesn't make them a sociopath for trying to give some meaning to inevitable deaths.

You and Hitchens are just grand-standing off the back of religion.

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