The Army of Darkness: Psychopaths Value Power and Control
Photo by RECEP TİRYAKİ on Unsplash
Imagine one day you’re minding your own business and you’re doing your banking only to suddenly have your screen flash really subtly or you notice for a microsecond a terminal window showed up in the middle of your screen and just as fast was suddenly gone. You don’t think much of it at all, so you keep working.
You decide you’re going to finish with your banking and you open up your thumb drive where you keep all your dirty little secrets. Perhaps you’ve got a bunch of money stashed away in cryptocurrency. Perhaps you’ve got a drive full of dirty pictures of your neighbor, or perhaps you’ve got a drive filled with porn that you’re hiding from your wife. It could be anything.
Everybody has 3 faces.
There is the face that you show the public. There is the face you show the people that are close to you. Then there is the secret face that you show no one or next to no one.
That is an established truth — everyone is hiding a secret face, but to what degree is your secret face hiding misdeeds?
That flash you saw on your computer was actually a hacker getting your desktop captured and they spend the day watching what you do. They saw how you accessed your drive and they saw that you had a bunch of receipts for illegal drugs that you purchased online from one of those pseudo-legal analogue designer drug shops. You’ve got yourself a cabinet full of amphetamine that you’ve been popping to stay awake on your night shifts.
You’ve also got some dirty pictures you snagged of your neighbor through your window or your security camera caught her topless sunbathing in the back and you’ve got 200 photos of her and it just so happens she’s someone that is important.
Suddenly, you start to notice weird things on your phone. It glitches out now and then but still seems to work okay so you don’t think anything of it. That is until you’re scrolling down MSN and you come to a series of adds and they say “Naughty neighbor creep spying on you?” and then there is an ad for new window shutters. The next add says “Don’t purchase amphetamine online or you could do time” and it’s an anti drug ad. You think to yourself — strange coincidence.
Then you continue surfing when you get a phone call. It’s your buddy and he says he can’t make it to the game — you’ll have to find someone else to go with.
You scroll down on your phone a little more and you see another add and it says ‘ditch your bad friends if they can’t be depended on’ and it’s a advertisement for volunteering for church.
This type of thing goes on for days until you look at the adds and you put together a message that they are saying. If you look at 3 adds together they say. ‘We know you are on drugs. You took photos of your neighbor. We have you now.’
You sit stunned — trying to compute the odds that these ads would be showing up like this when you see one more that say ‘When we tell you to do something, you do it’ and it’s an add for safety gear for mountain climbing.
You try to show your friend but you can’t into the stuff you’re hiding, but you still try to get him to see the pattern and he’s oblivious to it. You can’t comprehend how he can’t see the messages and he thinks you’re losing your mind. Intelligently, you drop it and say you were kidding.
This is where you have now been recruited into the Army of Darkness.
You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you don’t do what they say they will release the proof of what you’ve done and you’ll maybe get arrested and for sure you’ll be the creep of the neighborhood. There goes the election for city council you were banking on.
This is the genius of growing a network like this. You have people from all walks of life, government workers, you’ve got police, you’ve got preachers, you’ve got people of influence and people that can dig up information for you because they work for Child Services or the IRS.
There is an Army of Darkness that is building every day. It grows every day. Those with secrets will have your arm twisted. If those secrets are bad enough, you may get given a choice — be a slave or kill yourself.
Meanwhile, the Army of Darkness grew by one member because you’re not prepared to lose the City Council election — one day you get the message. Dig up any information that you have on John Doe from the East end of your city. You use your credentials and you find out all about John’s land, his payment history, and that the city has been called on him for noise multiple times.
It wasn’t much, but what you provided was the start of a profile of the next member of the Army of Darkness. It seemed like no big deal and you breathed a sigh of relief that the request was so reasonable. That is how the Army of Darkness stays invisible. They won’t push their luck beyond the value of what secrets you hide.
Psychopaths value power and control, and they have the power over you, and they now control you. Welcome to the Army of Darkness.