W. Sheppard Baird
Author
Preface
My decision to write "The Minoan Psychopath" was based on a heartfelt desire to help people better understand the
timeless and universal malignance of the psychopaths among us so compassionate and empathic people could better defend
themselves and their children. Everyday we see acts in the media of senseless chaos, mayhem, and destruction committed
on the innocent. Whether it's a schoolroom of 10 year old girls being gunned down or somebody being abducted,
murdered, or worse, most people perceive it as an endless theatre of incomprehensible self-obsessed criminal behavior.
Yet only rarely is the true cause of this abberance ever mentioned or discussed by reporters or media analysts.
The great mass of people are simply left with a profound feeling of resignation, hopelessness, sympathy for the victim,
and relief it wasn't them.
Most of us believe that some people are just "crazy", this is the way life is, and there is little anyone can do
except lock up those that are caught. But with the help of modern psychology this is no longer true! Humanity has
been blessed with the work of giants like Hervey Cleckley and Robert Hare who have greatly contributed to finally
giving humanity the knowledge of the true nature of this evil in our midst. More importantly, they have given us
the ability to detect them by observing their behavior. Anyone can do it if they possess the knowledge. This is
the most significant discovery the science of psychology has ever made. If everyone could learn just one concept
from psychology this is the single most important and practical of them all.
That lesson is quite simply there are some of us whose defective brains are completely incapable of feeling compassion
or empathy for others. The human struggle between good and evil is more accurately described as a struggle between the
compassionate and those incapable of it. In the words of Robert Hare they are "Without Conscience". This is the main
theme of my book "The Minoan Psychopath". It is written to help alleviate the damage and destruction caused by
our eternal plague of the mind - psychopathy.
Bio
As a victim of identity theft I'm going to keep this brief but I was born and raised on the eastern seaboard of the
US where I learned how to work the sail and man the oar of large open wooden boats on the Chesapeake Bay as a boy
scout. I am a graduate of a prestigious university in southern California and received an excellent classical
education in the arts, science, and engineering. Before becoming a writer I pursued a career as a technocrat
and have worked for some well-known multi-national corporations in a variety of analytical and executive positions.
I feel this scope of education and experience has prepared me well for my endeavors in writing and research.
Research
An unintended consequence of my book's research project developed when I decided to use the ancient Aegean as the
setting for it's characters. It was a period I had always been interested in and thought it would be a good way to
express the timelessness of my main theme. Naturally I wanted the book's backdrop and characters to be portrayed as
accurately as possible so I initiated a rigorous program of investigation to that end. My normal "no stone unturned
using the best resources available" approach produced a great deal of information and as many questions regarding
the archaeology of the time. I came to a point where I felt that some of the theories used to explain the
evidence were incomplete or logically weak. Things just didn't seem to add up, so I re-intensified my research
to include the building of a large geospatial archaeological and mineralogical database of Europe and the
Mediterranean basin using Google Earth. I tried my best to have everything of relevance mapped and over time came to
develop a new set of ideas for the way things actually were in that time. Some of which are expressed on this website.
In addition to developing a new theory for the Minoan civilization's collapse that implicates pyroclastic surge
activity (volcanic death winds of superheated gas) from the massive eruption of the Theran (Santorini, Greece) marine
volcano in about 1630 B.C., the evidence and highly probable clues left by their civilization throughout the Greater
Mediterranean have led me to a new interpretation of European Prehistory. If the hypothesis that the Los Millares
culture ("Culture of the Thousands") in Spain which has been radiocarbon dated to well before 3000 B.C. was actually
an Aegean Minoan gold and silver mining colony is validated by science the implications are very far-reaching.
If true, the Minoan civilization was really a vast Mediterranean maritime empire that later expanded its trade routes
into the Atlantic to acquire tin from Britain. Their naval power and shipping may have completely dominated the entire
Mediterranean Sea for over 2,000 years until the eruption of the Theran volcano. Not only does this place the Minoans in
southern Spain at the "Pillars of Hercules", but the sheer size of their empire makes them appear much more like Plato's
description of Atlantis. More profoundly, it ultimately leads to the origins of the Sea Peoples and the chaos and
destruction that occurred at the end of the Bronze Age.
W. Sheppard Baird
February 2, 2008
Copyright © 2007 W. Sheppard Baird
All Rights Reserved
minoanatlantis@gmail.com
