I don’t know the rules of the blogosphere, or of business, or of how not to be upset by the occasional sociopathic reaction.  I’m certain there are rules for all these things, as well as exceptions, but I’m taking a time out to say — I do not understand the rules here.  Or at least, I have not internalized them very well.

I’ll tell you the rules for working with impoverished kids, as they were taught to me when I was a teacher in Harlem.   Do not set high expectations for your students.  Keep the lesson plan simple, the goal clear, the step-by-step execution predictable and the outcome easy to quantify.  Always provide a worksheet with blanks for the kids to fill in.   The lesson plans were reviewed by people who had done their best to get out of the classroom and into supervisory positions where they could tell teachers how to teach, instead of working with children.  

It was unthinkable, in the difficult schools where I worked, that the students could actually generate ideas that could enhance their own educations.   I am currently attempting to prove that this model of motivating learning by letting creatively engaged students direct it works at least as well as the other.

The rule for success with attracting more readers to your blahg is, apparently, to immediately visit and like back anyone who sends you an email saying they like your blahg.  It seems like fair play, good form, a decent thing to do and all that.  Writing a few words praising another blog  in your blahg, or linking to it, apparently does not have the same meaning in the blogosphere.  OK, live and learn, what difference does it make anyway whether I set a personal record for most views on a given day or week or for least views?   It would appear to be mainly vanity that has most of us rattling here, to be thought thoughtful, clever, modest, deadly in the clutch, poetic.

Some turn their blahgs into lucrative businesses.  I saw one the other day, a woman who liked a couple of my posts, who appears to have done that, with 25,000 devoted followers and a host of corporations and other businesses who have signed on to be part of it.  An inspirational American success story, by the looks of it, and I wish the woman who writes and lives it every success.  She certainly deserves it, she’s an inspiration.

The more difficult thing for me is reacting well to the occasional sucker punch from a sociopath.  Anyone flipping the channels of the TV might laugh to hear me say this.   Not an hour goes by where we do not see a dramatization of this, hear a news report of it, or listen to a pious, boastful or motivational speech by one kind of highly successful sociopath or another.  These folks are often highly motivated, driven, hard-working, smart, cunning and, when necessary, ruthless.  These qualities are seen in almost every boardroom and in governments of every level.  They are leadership qualities.  Not all leaders are sociopaths, not all sociopaths are leaders, but there are enough sociopaths who are highly successful business leaders and public servants to prove the rule.

“Call me a sociopath, then,” the old sociopath might say, affecting a mocking yet convincingly hurt-looking expression, “I’ll go cry in my villa, then in my Lear Jet, I’ll sob all the way over to my pied a terre in Paris, and cry there, then I’ll sniffle through dinner, the opera and try my best to be consoled by my twenty-five year old mistress, the current silver medalist in Kama Sutra who is also Ms. Tahiti.   It sure sucks being a sociopath, though I wouldn’t be you, loser.”

I get it.  It doesn’t suck being a sociopath.  It sucks being victimized by a sociopath.  The sociopath doesn’t feel your pain, doesn’t feel his own very much, except as a goad to keep him focused.  Like a shark that needs to keep moving and eating, this type plunges endlessly forward.

It wearies me greatly to think about it anymore at the moment, except to exclaim “darn it!  Sociopaths, sheesh!”