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I did not know about this word until recently, only to discover that it is an outdated personality descriptor, replaced nowadays by ‘Anti-social personality disorder’.

In its extreme form, this disorder becomes psychopathy. Psychopaths are often extremely dangerous people, best described as extremely anti-social.

But why has evolution thrown up such personalities?

I’ll answer this by creating an artificial situation, where the whole population in a village are all basically socially healthy and integrated. Respect reigns supreme.

One of the key underpinnings of good social behaviour is a strong regard for the feelings and welfare of others. To be sociable, you have to tune in at least a little into how others feel. This can be quite demanding - both the tuning in and the offers of verbal and other support in times of need, both small or large.

Supposing a child in this village were to be born with a mind that does not have this capability. He would not be able to tune in to how others feel. As a consequence, he would not be weighed down with the needs of others socially thrust upon him. But to fit in, he would have to compensate for his lack of feeling. So we give him some charm. Charisma that blinds others to his total lack of empathy. He can often be upbeat because others do not get him down or demand of him. He is oblivious to their needs or moods or feelings.

Because he does not care about others - he cannot help this - he may take advantage of them. Little indiscretions, or maybe theft. He lives outsides the bounds of the social rules - they seem too petty for him anyway. So he must also have a lack of feeling himself about the awkwardness of being on the fringe - he must be happy to enjoy the spoils of his illegal gains. So he has no guilt in addition to no empathy.

But being anti-social would surely lose him friends? Yes and no.  He would continually be able to charm others to like him. His carefree approach to life, liberated as he is from social responsibility is attractive to many. He takes risks, is the life and soul of parties, where rowdy behaviour and showmanship are rife, and empathy is sidelined.

So the anti-social person fits nicely into life, and continues to do so, dancing around the edge of the intricate fabric of social conventions - conventions that oblige socially minded people to trust before mistrusting. The anti-social character is unlikely to be mistrusted when he can turn his charm on.

The interesting thing is that around 1 in 30 humans have this disrorder. This is a very high percentage.

The very nature of social bonding is always likely to tolerate a relatively high percentage of such types because it blinds us to the possibilities that people really could behave like this.

Another blog entry catalysed by a book I am reading. The book is entitled “How to choose to be happy”.

The title seemed odd to me. Why not just “How to be happy”? Of course, the crux of the matter is that far more of our happiness and enjoyment in our lives derives from the choices we make.

Psychologists have known for a long time that we each have our own baseline level of happiness that is pretty invariant over the years. After big swings following happy or sad events, it tends to normalise back to the baseline.

But what they have now learnt is that we are not as stuck at this baseline as we appear to have to be. By making different decisions, we can guide our happiness levels upwards over the long term.

I’ve only read a few chapters of the book but feel that the crux of the book’s message is that our long term happiness is a consequence of our attitude, and not on events or things. A new TV may make us happy for a while, but it is a temporary lift. A friend not turning up may make us sad, but it too is temporary.

If our attitude is that each day will ne enjoyable now matter how it pans out - if we go with the flow - then we can remain bouyant of mood, even when things conspire against us.

Because I am an emotional man, even small mishaps tend to generate big emotional responses. And I then make the bad decision of buying into that emotion and turn it into a mood, making me feel hard done by. Conversely, when I feel great, I go about the day in a slightly fragile, cautious way, determined to hold onto this feeling and make it a perfect day.

My focus is on things going well or not. Happiness can be sustained in spite of what happens.

Last night I slept very badly, taking hours to drop off and waking too early. Too much on my mind. But rather than beat myself up, or feel that life is unfair (this is easy to do when you feel damaged by emotions or thinking a lot), I just stayed chilled, not fretting that sleep eluded me. And then choosing to not worry about how I feel today. I’m tired and my head hurts, and I may well struggle staying awake tonight, New Year’s eve, but I’ll not project ahead and get uptight. I’ll just let the day pan out as it will.

When you get this resilience to what each day may offer, you will feel happier. Happiness, it appears, is something that you cannot directly strive for. It seems to be a consequential state of mind, when things are all hunky-dory. And if things appear to be hunky-dory when not because of your change of attitude, then you will be happy more often.

More on this later I suspect.

At least a number of people tell me this when they try to explain why I keep having headaches.

My own view is that excessive thinking, rather than getting on with life is a big factor. They are right in that sense.

But even then, it is really not the thinking. Honestly, and categorically.

Much as no one is ever ever frightened of snakes, or spiders, or of dying.

Ah, I hear you say, I have lost the plot. But I say not. It is not my thinking that is the problem, but the emotional charge to that thinking - the emotional drive that sets the thinking going, that flares up as the thinking proceeds, and keeps on rolling after the thinking has stopped.

It is not the snake that is frightening - it is the emotional reaction to the presence of the snake that we do not like. It is this response that is frightening - not the snake itself.

In laymens terms, yes, it is a fear of snakes. But the point I alude to is that our ultimate joy and fear of what life offers is not intrinsically supplied by life but our emotional reaction to it. It is bery much as when you arrange for a great day out, but find your emotional response is not right, even though you have the best seats in the house and the performance is fab. And othertimes, you find yourself giggling when you have spilt freshly bought milk.

We all too often place a causal relation between event our the quality of our life.  Get that new TV and life is on the up. For good. We know that the novelty will wear off, and we have to buy something to kick the novelty back in.

But returning to my thinking, no, I am not guilty of causing my headaches by my thinking. First of all, after 14 years of headaches, the corrolation between thinking and the headaches is fairly small. Second, even thought there is a correlation, it is not the thinking alone that is the cause - it is my emotional sensitivity. An emotional sensitivity that has been amplified by earlier years of trauma.  It is still on guard, and no amount of thinking can reset it to a lower trigger threshold.

Senescence was a new word I encountered today. It describes the aging proces in humans and animals. Where our bodies are programmed to decay and lose function as we go into old age. We either die of an illnes, injury, or simply old age.

What no one had told me in my 51 years on this planet is that creatures such as turtles have neglible senescence. When they mature, they do not age. If they can avoid fatal illnesses and injuries, they are in effect immortal.

So why is it no one told me that? And what does it me in evoluntionary terms?

I had assumed that the aging process ensured nicely finite lives, preventing the evoluntionary process from drawing out too long. Or from a disproportionate percentage of the aged amongst the popluation.

Do you know any more?

Grow, grow grow! This is the capitalist mantra. The unquestionable word of business.

Grow or die!

I have trivial business experience, and an unqualified in questioning the mantra for it’s business value. But what I do question is it’s long term vailidity.

Growth is a form of change, and as such is a necessary part and parcel of life. If you do not change with the times, you can readily flounder. But the whole point of adaption for survival is that it is not predicated on the same mantra. Growth is meaningful at many times in the life of a business. But as the main stay of its future, it should surely be questioned.

First, it smacks of pure greed. Businesses take a bigger and bigger slice of the market. Execpt, of course, they cannot all do this, so this greed squeezes and kills other businesses. Of course, this is partly the way of the World - survival or demise. But it is amplified by this unnecessary greed.

Second, as businesses grow, they distance themselves from both the lower rungs of their employees and also their customers. They become bigger than these people. Or the obsession with growth forces this hand.

Third, the profit that fuels this growth becomes sacrosanct. Better by far to sell your customers short, or polute the environment in ways you can get away with then ever jeopardise the burgeoning profit line.

And so on.

I’ll counter my argument at this point to say that companies like Canon, on whom I rely to produce astonshingly complex and powerful cameras and lenses could only operate as it does with its enormous size. It can manufacture its own processors, lenses, cameras and so on, in a very efficient, synergystic way. Such a large company is self sufficient very much because of its size.

But this counter to my argument is actually an endoresement for it.

I am not arguing per se against growth as a modus operandi for a business.

I am arguing against growth as the only mantra for all businesses. Businesses should operate appropriately, in accord with the type of business they operate, and the changing customer needs and working environment. In other words, growth should be an option, not a mandate. It is only one of a number of devices a business can adopt to manage its future.

If you project forward this growth mantra, large companies become corporations that become so big they are bigger thanGovernments. Their size then allows them to leverage tax breaks that fuel further growth, trampling on the well behaved competition, who cannot lobby as effectively. The Governments are fearful of these juggernaut corporations - they receive huge tax incomes from them, and do not want to lose these or destabilise the economy.

These corporations squeeze salaries of their workers wherever they can. If all we get left with is a small number of enormous corporations that control or own all the small businesses, their monopoly becomes dangerous. Yet the Governments are too weak to do anything about it.

The underlying point I am making is that the World has finite resources. It cannot sustain constant growth. The ebb and flow of life and business should be the norm, not unsustainable expansion. The latest banking bailouts are evidence of Governmental fear, and unrestrained growth that ruthlessly discards constraints such as regularotory bodies, and the time honoured mechanism of retaining the cushion of large reserves.