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Psychopathy and the law — 20 Comments

  1. You’ll draw me out yet, neo.

    The biggest mistake people make, I believe, in trying to understand psychopaths is that they draw upon their own life experiences as a filter through which to gain insight or understanding. This, I have found through personal experience, is impossible.

  2. Schmidty:

    Agreed!

    And that’s what the people in the article are trying to do.

    Psychopaths are profoundly different in such basic ways that it is virtually impossible to “understand” them. Even those who spend their professional lives trying, such as Cleckley (who came closest to “understanding”) can mostly only describe. His descriptions, however, are so detailed and so well-observed that after reading the book a person can at least be sensitive to some of the signs. That’s all.

  3. I know you’ve touched on this in the past Neo but, in reading Cleckley’s description, I was still struck by how many of the psychopath’s traits apply to our current President. Particularly his continuous disregard of the truth and his evasions of responsibility.

  4. What we call psychopathy in the West is actually a behavioral norm in some warrior tribes. Their tradition of socialization and child rearing produces exactly this type of personality.

  5. Schmidty and Neoneocon,

    “The biggest mistake people make, I believe, in trying to understand psychopaths is that they draw upon their own life experiences as a filter . . . . ”

    Isn’t drawing upon one’s own experiences to understand others something that we all do all of the time? I can’t understand reality through your mindset simply because I am not you. IMO this implies a certain innate narcissism in all human activity and perhaps feeds the leftist sanctimony driving the left to view those who disagree with them as “evil.”**

    I offer that we should carry that idea one level higher. The big mistake is not that we do such a thing, but that we forget or ignore the fact that we do it. When we recognize that other people don’t necessarily think, feel, see or “see” the way we do we begin to face reality.

    Some have used such reasoning to justify untoward acts (the perpretrator as the victim of a greater unseen evil), but such a thought does not excuse personal responsibility nor prohibit us from identifying right from wrong.

    —–

    **Is not the Old Testament exhortation of an eye for an eye (the punishment should fit the crime not exceed it) and the New Testament exhortation to treat others as we would be treated ourselves simply a call to step beyond that innate narcissism?

  6. New York has a category of murder reserved specifically for “depraved indifference,” currently defined as “a mens rea of utter disregard for the value of human life” with an additional element of recklessness. The original idea was to provide for a murder conviction when the murderer did not have the specific intent to kill ordinarily associated with intentional murder but nonetheless behaved intentionally and with such — well — depravity that nothing but a murder conviction is appropriate. The classic example is shooting a gun into a crowd of people without caring who you hit or whether you hit anyone or not.

    The depraved indifference category has led to many ,many years of mystification, bewilderment and litigation as New York courts have struggled to figure out exactly what is and is not “utter disregard” and have repeatedly changed the rules as they struggle to match the concept to the — seemingly endless ways that New York criminals find to demonstrate just how depraved and just how indifferent a human being can be. To some degree the courts have simply thrown up their collective hands and said, “We know it when we see it.” It seems to me that what underlies New York’s difficulty in grappling with depraved indifference murder is very similar to your readers’ difficulty in grappling with the concept of the psychopathic terrorist: the impossibility of trying to understand what cannot be understood. We can recognize it, we can describe it, but those of us who are not psychopaths and do not act with depraved indifference cannot understand those who are and those who do, try as we may.

  7. In regard to the law, I suspect that many laymen, such as myself, make the same mistake I was guilty of on the prior thread; assuming perhaps unconsciously, that ‘character disorders’ are a form of mental illness.

    Even though not all psychopaths or sociopaths are violent, enough are as to have established that characterization in the laymen’s mind.

    I think most laymen consider a violent psychopath or sociopath’s amorality and lack of conscience, so disturbing as to equate it with mental illness.

    Forgetting that an insanity plea is based on an inability to know right from wrong.

    The assumption being that a human being embodying such ‘depraved indifference’ can’t be completely sane. That evil itself is a form of insanity.

  8. One of commonest delusions of modern humanists is ascribing to other cultures our own cultural features as if they were universal human traits. They are not. Actually, they are acquired traits of socialization in Judeo-Christian culture. It took 2000 years to make them widely accepted and common. Those cultures that never were exposed to this influence still are in “natural” state of savagery, which we call psychopathy when such traits are encountered among our brethren. Do I need to explain that many, if not all Islamic tribes fit this description?

  9. sergey:

    People who act savagely in war are not necessarily psychopaths at all, especially if they are acting according to the mores of their own culture. No culture encourages psychopathy, which involves a lack of a moral core across the board, an inner emptiness, and a propensity and facility for creating a false surface to hide it.

    The false surface is the one that appears (falsely) to conform very well, in fact in a superior manner, to the mores of the prevailing culture.

    Nor are all psychopaths violent; that is another misconception.

    The more I write about this, the more clear it is to me that there are a lot of misunderstandings about what is meant by psychopathy. But I suppose that’s not surprising; it’s actually a rather difficult and anti-intuitive concept to grasp.

  10. Geoffrey, the condition you described used to be called “moral insanity” and as such did not make a person unaccountable for his crimes.

  11. Some cultures not only tolerate cruelty and lies, but actively promote them as a social norm. Of course, these behaviors are prohibited in relation to ones own blood relatives, but only if there are no internal feud in the family. If there is, all bets are off. Brothers betray and kill brothers and are glorified for doing so. And everybody outside one’s extended family are fair game, not to speak about those who do not belong to the tribe or religion. This “false facade” of civility is all too common in “honor cultures” (like Arabic) as opposed to “guilt cultures” like Jewish or Christian ones. There is some moral code, of course, but it has nothing to do with compassion or reciprocity, it is all about following tribal rules and maintaining family “honor”, which can include killing one’s own sister or daughter for a crime of adultery. In other words, the behavior which we would call psychopathic in Western people, is perfectly normal in some other cultures.

  12. sergey,

    Yes, the ME proverb applies; “My Brother and I against My Cousin; My Cousin and I against the Stranger”

    One correction; though it certainly qualifies, adultery is not needed, any sexual behavior by a sister or daughter outside of marriage qualifies, indeed the rape of a sister or daughter, without four(!) male witnesses testifying upon her behalf applies… with the killing of the sister or daughter as necessary to ‘restore’ family ‘honor’.

  13. Just ask yourself: were all Nazi killers psychopaths? Or Beslan massacre perps? Hardly. They behaved like ones, sure, but because they were culturally conditioned to do so. If not personal failure to properly socialize, but culture itself makes human beings completely striped of compassion to some other people, this culture itself can be justly called psychopathic. It is a pipeline producing psychopaths on grand scale, and Chechen culture, like Nazi one, is the best example of this phenomenon.

  14. sergey

    as you and i know, communism is rule by sociopaths/psychopaths…

    the power and reward structure without the punishment is tailor made… not to mention the other reformations of average people into those more conducive to being used, or abused for entertainment and reward

  15. sergey:

    I believe you’re making my point. Most of the perpetrators of evil in such cultures are not actually psychopaths in the usual sense—although of course some are (I strongly believe Stalin was, for example, and quite a few others). The culture values some psychopaths as useful to it, if their psychopathy can be channeled to further the aims of the rulers (or if they are the rulers).

    Such governments as the Soviets or the Nazis encourage pathology and evil, to be sure, especially among those in power. But I don’t think the entire culture is literally psychopathic, although the government is pathological and evil.

    Probably just semantics, but “psychopathy” and “psychopath” are rather specific terms, and I think they apply to a more finite set of circumstances than you are claiming they do.

  16. Re what Neo said about a culture valuing the usefulness of some psychopaths — this from a review of a recent book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths:

    [the author] at any rate supports the idea that to thrive a society needs its share of psychopaths — about 10%. It not only shows the value of the emotionally detached mind in bomb disposal but also the uses of the psychopath’s ability to intuit anxiety as demonstrated by, for example, customs officials. Along the way his analysis tends to reinforce the idea that the chemistry of megalomania which characterises the psychopathic criminal mind is a close cousin to the set of traits often best rewarded by capitalism. Dutton draws on a 2005 study that compared the profiles of business leaders with those of hospitalised criminals to reveal that a number of psychopathic attributes were arguably more common in the boardroom than the padded cell: notably superficial charm, egocentricity, independence and restricted focus. The key difference was that the MBAs and CEOs were encouraged to exhibit these qualities in social rather than antisocial contexts.

    Of course, that review is in The Guardian, so perhaps a bit of anti-capitalist bias showing here?

  17. sergey writes: One of commonest delusions of modern humanists is ascribing to other cultures our own cultural features as if they were universal human traits. They are not. Actually, they are acquired traits of socialization in Judeo-Christian culture.

    This. This is the point. neo writes that no culture actively encourages psychopathy, but that only counts for the in-group and the borders for what constitutes a sense of shared identity change constantly.

    This lack of a moral core should be called what it is: a lack of adequate conditioning in accordance with an accepted social standard. And the social standard for Judeo-Christian societies is to value human life, any human life, more than you value cultural principle.

    This is taken as rational when it clearly is not from the perspective of the individual seeking their self-interest or from the perspective of someone alienated from the society they inhabit. The scary thing about psychopaths is that they can be truly and brutally rational, or in the case of Dhzokhar, that their alienation can spell disaster. They are empowered. Those hamstrung by social conditioning are not. That’s not a matter of a society actively encouraging pathology and evil; it’s a matter of a restriction against rational interests being lifted.

  18. I learned early on that violence is divided into social and asocial aspects. With anti social merely being another subset of the social: society and communication between humans.

    You can make people kill each other, if you do a simple thing. De humanize the opponent. In this fashion you can make it easier for people to justify following the kill orders. They will then not consider it the use of non sanctioned social violence, and will thus have guilt free consciences. After all, we don’t feel guilty when we kill cockroaches and ants do we? They aren’t human are they? Dogs and cats are closer, but still not human so thus we feel for their loss slightly less than we would feel for our family. It may be a minor subjective difference, but there is a difference in value. There is a difference in the society status between human and non-human.

    Another method to get people to kill is to have them drop the social limiters that prevent them from harming another human (in their society). This allows them to kill humans and not have to fear humanity’s consequences: like exile or execution. This can be accomplished via drugs, a strong enough motivator, fear, or merely the promise of money backed by strong emotions. They use one limiter to fight another. Once the limiter on killing is defeated, the human can act now.

    Still another method is to have people in fear for their life, so they can kill to save themselves. This is one method in war, and sometimes the most effective one. It tends to have various PTSD side effects though. Fear alone cannot justify the after effects of violence, especially if one didn’t choose the battle/war to begin with. Guilt and the conscience begins to nag at people if they don’t receive the appropriate socialized forgiveness and justifications. War propaganda is often times necessary in order to prevent soldiers from falling prey to PTSD or other conscience issues. Normal socialized people stop caring after a certain amount of combat time. They don’t shoot the enemy. They may not even save themselves.

    Psychopaths can be divided into the asocial and social categories as well. There are individuals who use such talents for productive causes and that prevents them from going on serial killing sessions. Other people with such inclinations hide in the sheep crowd, and pick off the sheep when they feel the urge. Serial killers often report unknown urges and desires which are stronger than hunger. They have to satisfy them sooner or later, or they start malfunctioning in society’s sheep herds.

    A socialized psychopath can then be a Spartan warrior that would be fine killing 99% of the world, so long as the 1% were his fellow Spartans who praised his courage. Without his society, he would have no conscience, but because he is part of the group, the group is his limiter and control.

    The pure psychopaths don’t particularly feel anything for one society’s rules vs another’s. They are more pragmatic.

    Human beings were originally developed and evolved to form cooperative groups. Thus a conscience, guilt over killing people or having more food/money than others, is a genetic expression. Psychopaths, either because they don’t need society or because they don’t care about society’s rules, are outside that sphere of behavior. They, unlike anyone else, can choose to follow society’s rules or break them without any guilty conscience. They follow rules only because it benefits them. They break rules because they want to break them, and not because society says it is right or wrong to break rules. They don’t need a conscience, the nature’s way of natural selection, to determine who the strongest competitor is.

    To put it in another way, killers are shunned by society because humans understand that someone who can kill, is no longer normal. Not even if they do it for the benefit of the “group”. No “normal person” can kill, except at great emotional urging or preparation.

    Those who can kill at the drop of a dime, with no emotional escalation or preparation or desire for a justification, can thus be considered a sort of sociopath or psychopath. Those who can control this state and use it for the benefit of civilization, are called warriors and heroes. Those who can’t control it or use it for destructive purposes, may be labeled a serial killer, a mass murderer, or just a murderer (criminal exile).

    In some ways, this is why heroes are another form of mass murderer, as considered by some. One man’s freedom fighter and hero, is another man’s black boy executing Zimmerman.

    No matter who you kill, some may praise it, while others criticize you as being someone who should be executed by the pack or exiled from the herd. You’re “dangerous” to the herd.

    That is the entire meaning of “killing” or stealing someone else’s life for your own desire and motivations. It means ending their life and goals, in order to benefit yourself, while accruing all the hate, consequences, thereafter. That is the realistic consequences of being a killer, whether people call you a good one or an evil one. There are a lot of ways to deceive yourself into thinking you didn’t kill anyone useful, valuable, or “human” at all and cover it up that way. Psychopaths have no need for that, because they have no conscience. Society cannot indoctrinate them effectively. They are, in effect, intelligent ferals. A psychopath wouldn’t be what they were, if they had to pretend they were crushing ants. Because they have empathy, because they communicate with humans and know that they are valuable, worthy, and human, that is why they enjoy killing or that is why they break humans. They hunt humans. They make life less boring.

    That’s why normal socialized “sane” people try hard to not kill. Some even will let themselves be killed before they use violence (true pacifists). While others use a noble justification for violence (peace marching anti war pacifists). They use violence to get what they want, but stop short of killing, as if that proves their social bonds. Socialized humans are trained to use (verbal) violence as a tool, but killing merely depletes the society’s man power and thus survival chances.

    To me, violence is just violence. There’s only two kinds. I don’t separate people into those who use violence for “good” vs violence for “evil”. Violence is just violence. Wind is just the wind. Fire is fire. Evil or good is a different category applied by humans. However, if we use violence to kill or coerce all humans to think and do as we say, then if nobody is around to say violence is bad, does that mean violence is always good?

    Force and might, makes right, in the eyes of the Left. It’s a metaphysical truth, that is only broken if you find higher truths.

    So long as humans live around others and in society, we require masks to hide our true natures. Often to the point where we forget who we truly are and remake ourselves to please our fellows. A person will never find their inner strength that way. Which is why people go on voyages and journeys, to “find themselves”, because only by going to places where no humans or no humans that you know are, can you ever “find yourself”. All most people ever do is look in the mirror of other people’s faces and make the reflection look right to other people. This is their social mask, or facade, that protects them in society, lets them operate in society. A normal, socialized, sane person is satisfied with this. A psychopath may find it empty, boring, or “not enough”; they do not need facades to survive.

    A warlord often had several individuals like that he needed to keep in check. Pragmatic rewards and promises of absolutely guaranteed terror and punishments, were effective. Killers and psychopaths may argue about the worth of society. They do not really argue about the difference between a person that is alive and a corpse. Except perhaps in Bundy’s case where he might forward the claim that corpses are better for everything overall. (Obama’s focus on making (or saying) corpses may mean he partially agrees) Even the “common criminals” found it disgusting to be grouped with those monsters. The power over life and death, is perhaps the only thing that psychopaths can have respect for. Everything else might as well as be fantasy rules made up by powerless children. Cannibalism is wrong? Incest is wrong? Conning people is wrong and shouldn’t be done? Killing for pleasure is wrong? A special sort of person is free from society’s dictates, at least mentally speaking. Those who cannot operate at the same level, may be rightfully afraid of such loose cannons that could explode at any time or place. The most evil society in history, had laws and a hierarchy. Without fear and social rules, even that evil authority structure would collapse.

    Essentially, a good person is someone who follows his own heart and doesn’t care about what society says is right or wrong. They follow their own conscience. Psychopaths, having no conscience, follows neither that nor society, so they are “free” in a sense. Because they are human, yet free of being human, they get bored. Easily. Killing people and achieving that power, may sound real interesting.

  19. Highlander,

    Judging by Obama’s past and biographies, he wasn’t born a sociopath or psychopath. He may have remade himself in the form of one, but he’s still bound by a sort of societal ideology: Leftism.

    I would call Obama a sociopath in the sense that Leftism is an ideology that demands a certain form of sociopathy. An organization and society just for psychopaths? Perhaps.

    But Obama wasn’t born as a psychopath, so I wouldn’t call him pure. Nor does he have access to the full “capabilities” of one either.

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