Smoking in Romanian restaurants

I am very sorry for people who smoke and strongly wish they would stop, but seeing people smoke in Romanian restaurants makes me happy to live in a free, civilised country. How many bad things are going to be visited on Romania in years to come, thanks to the EU. At the moment, to quote William Buckley's stirring clarion call, Romania is standing athwart history yelling stop.

When one sees ashtrays in cafés one knows one is one of the last bastions of freedom and respect for property rights in Europe. Who would have thought in 1989 that Romania would soon be far freer than England but it is, by miles.

By the way, smoking is no pleasure at all, none, a vice as pleasureless as avarice. Tobacco is the perfect industry for psychopaths and I wonder how many work in it. I know a female psychopath in a senior job (she never smoked) who loves the fact that the tobacco company she works for kills millions of people. It gives every day a savage zest for her which is in some way linked to sex.

Vampires do exist

Vampires do exist. They are called psychopaths or sociopaths (the words are interchangeable) and are in a true sense the undead. They appear to be very vivacious but this is an illusion. They draw their energy from those around them, especially their victims. 

They have no consciences. Their characteristics include extreme manipulativeness, total egocentricity, shallow emotions, fearlessness, callousness (they lack 'warm' empathy but have 'cold' empathy, meaning they are very good at reading others' emotions), superficial charm, charisma and antisocial behaviour. 

I came to know at least two of these perverse and dangerous people in Romania. Both were good-looking and highly intelligent women. One of them, let us call her Paula, matched President Mitterand's description of Mrs. Thatcher - 'the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe'. 

The eyes are significant - the penetrating and prolonged psychopathic stare is part of the way in which they mesmerise their victims, while spinning lies or playing games. Another is by conversational hypnosis. They have soothing and caressing voices which enable them to lull their victims into acquiescence and even to implant ideas (commands) into the victims' minds, although when they are not using this mode their voices are very cold and tellingly ugly. Voices, unlike physical appearance, are, by the way, one of the best ways of reading people. 


Psychopaths like positive people because they need to find sources of energy. People without power or energy are of no use to them.

For psychopaths most of mankind are zombies. Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is pure psychopathy, expresses the psychopath's contempt for the mass of humanity:

Do you ever feel as if the world is full of zombies? Mindless people who merely obey the dictates of society and their own emotions, showing no sign of rationality, letting others decide who and what they’re going to be in this life, regurgitating moral nostrums as if they were pearls of the highest wisdom, attacking those who are not like them and wanting desperately to turn all outsiders into exact replicas of themselves... ?

One characteristic psychopaths  have which has not, to my knowledge, been remarked on is that they find their lives very tiring. It is draining to be a psychopath, constantly manipulating, lying and simultaneously juggling mind games with various people on various levels. Like autists, psychopaths often have photographic memories and minds that work very quickly and this too is tiring. My two psychopaths looked young and seemed vivacious both admitted that they tired very quickly and I came to realise that they were very old in their hearts. Undead. This is why, unlike the vampires of myth, both liked early nights.

Psychopaths are so good at reading and manipulating people that I finally concluded that it is about more than lightning-quick intellects: they have psychic powers, as many people do. They get into the minds of those they interact with. Paula told me that she sometimes had prophetic dreams and always knew if she was going to get her way at an encounter before it began. She could usually read people perfectly. She only failed, she told me, with stupid people and with 'a few people who wouldn't let me in at all and all of those, I discovered later, hated me. Not for any reason', she added, unconvincingly. On one of the first occasions when I met Paula, I had a psychic experience myself. I saw a black aura around her, blotting out the sunlight from a summer evening at the Marriott Hotel. 

A down to earth material explnation, on the other hand s that is the psychopath's inability to feel stress which lets him see calmly and unemotionally. Psychopaths and Tibetan monks, who learn calm from meditation, detect deep emotions that are invisible to others, according to the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Kevin Dutton. 



Psychopaths cannot be bargained with or trusted under any circumstances. Psychopaths are dangerous and should be steered very well clear of. Apart from the harm that they delight to inflict on those around them, if they judge it safe and politic to do so, they carry around with them black clouds which occlude the happiness and joy of life. They feel savage glee and rejoice in tricks and lies but the happiness they obtain from life is most of the time thin. They are black holes. Carlyle said that 'In the moments of our greatest happiness there is something that prevents us being wholly happy. That something is nothing other than the shadow of ourselves.' That shadow makes up the psychopath's whole existence.

Dr. Martin Israel, the author of a leading work on pathology, who went on to become an Anglican priest and a famous authority on psychic forces, believed that psychopaths are: 

especially powerful mediums of destructive cosmic forces, and their power is related to their intelligence and their ability to communicate on a psychic level with other people. The murderous type of dictator, so common in our century, typifies this trend to its most devastating extent.

This, I believe, is exactly right. Stalin is a very good example.

Israel goes on to say:

The end of the powers of evil, wherever we may place their origin, is world domination. But behind this outer desire for conquest there is a hidden, deeper lust for total destruction. The evil impulse looks for the death of all life, the corruption of all beauty and the perversion of all truth and justice.

Female psychopath

This detail from Bosch's curious painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Paula's favourite painting, reminds me of her (she is, like most psychopaths, very promiscuous). The penetrating beak, the huge mouth, the underbelly being feasted on by hommes moyens sensual who are on their way to self destruction and, especially, the grasping hands. 

The picture, Paula said, is 'as much about contemporary New York as Holland centuries ago. I have stared for hours at every detail trying to imagine the story behind each figure.' No doubt she did so to learn as much from it as she can, because psychopaths  are only interested in knowledge they can use. 

What did she learn from it? Everyone in the painting is suffering or will suffer as a result of their weaknesses, except the pitiless satanic creatures who efficiently administer the punishments and are enjoying their task. 

The Satanic agents in the Garden of Earthly Delights are the only pure figures. They are like psychopaths, in fact, for psychopaths are curiously inhuman. They are evil yet not corrupt, are in fact incorruptible, although possessing all the deadly sins themselves. Psychopaths feel emotions such as savage glee, lust, greed, and most of all contempt and boredom but their emotional range is very limited and they do not have normal feelings, especially not feelings of  affection, or consciences which derive from such feelings. They are the proof that Aristotle and Kant were wrong to think that virtue proceeds from reason, for psychopaths  are very sane and completely rational. Conscience and virtue are functions of love not reason. 

Psychopaths, when they let down their guards, seem like creatures from outer space, not humans at all, though Diana, the second psychopath I knew, said to me once that 'I still hope somewhere in me is a little shred of humanity'. I felt sorry for her, which seemed absurd. Diana also said to me, while listening to a Bach concerto: 'This was written from pure hatred.'

Psychopaths, by the way, also seem oddly to transcend their nationality, social class and even their sex. Paula and Diana, for example, in many ways seemed like homosexual men in women's bodies.

I asked Paula what this detail from the Bosch painting meant to her, but all she said was, in the dreamy voice she affects:

'It's so enjoyable to be eaten'. 

She added:

'Victims want to be victims. I really believe that.'

And on this occasion she was telling the truth. This is, curiously, what all psychopaths  believe and perhaps at a deep level they are often right. 

There seems to be a genetic basis, although this is not certain, to psychopathy. Psychopaths' brains when scanned differ from those of normal people, but brains develop in childhood, just as personality traits do. One interesting fact is that psychopaths are more likely to have blue or green eyes than the general population. If this is true then Romania has fewer psychopaths per capita for blue and green eyes are rare in this country of brunettes. But I wonder.



For more about psychopaths by me please click here and here.



Note: I have come across this interesting blog on the subject by the well-known Romanian-American novelist, Claudia Moscovici.

Romanians in the museum

Andrei Plesu writing in Dilema in 2006: 

Much less numerous and not at all willing to invest their money into a paid visit, they organise themselves by criteria that are other than the usual ones. One of their characteristics is their interest in the other visitors; in what those wear, or how they behave, or what their taste options are. “Let’s see what those ones are looking at!” is a current strategic principle as well as, paradoxically, its opposite: “Quick, let’s go to Mona Lisa while there’s no crowd!”. Individualists, Romanians prefer the solitary visit or the small group (family or work colleagues), a situation in which hierarchies of expertise are born spontaneously and are as firm as they are arbitrary: one of the persons becomes, by some mysterious decanting of authority, the other ones’ guide.

Before 1989, I saw such a commando of my compatriots, made up of three of them, piously walking through the halls of the “Van Gogh” Museum in Amsterdam. Pleasantly impressed by their cultural zeal (especially since at the time, I wasn’t in too much doubt about their professional background), I followed them, discreetly and sentimentally, to enjoy their enjoyment. One of them promptly took up the role of the guide: in front of each work of art, he would take an efficient fencing-like lunge towards the label, to then communicate to his comrades the essential piece of information. For some reason, the fellow had decided that in the case at hand, the essential piece of information was the date. He would therefore lean over to read the inscription next to the image, after which he would reveal to his fellows what they were to retain: 1884! The fellows would nod meditatively, with a well-sensed mixture of comprehension and perplexity. In the next moment, the triad would take a lateral step to the right, our man would lean forward again, he would read the label and would whisper, troubled: 1884! The same reaction, the same manoeuvre to the right, and again: 1884! The coincidence started to be revealing. One of the other two couldn’t hold it within himself any more and, stolen by sublime effusion, he moaned aporetically*: “Did that man paint a lot in 1884!” At which point it was the consecrated “guide”'s turn to re-enter his rights: “What do you expect; he wasn’t a colossus for nothing!” This episode, just as our country’s entire history, is untranslatable!

I think Romanians - both rich and middling class - do like to go on holiday in often very large groups. This may be a transitory phenomenon. Until twenty years ago one only saw Japanese tourists in large coach parties but now solitary Japanese travellers are rather common and coach parties rare. Maybe it is  legacy of communism. Certainly looking at museums is about intellectual, social and racial hierarchy and could furnish material for a book. Anglo-Saxons are looking, Latins were previously looked at. The Japanese tourist is sub-consciously resented by Europeans because he looks at Europeans rather than is looked at by them, an inversion of the colonial order of things. 

A friend of mine was in the Louvre standing behind a couple from Northern England looking at a painting by one of the Impressionists. The man turned to the woman and said in a Yorkshire accent,  'See that painting? That painting's over a hundred years old.'