Ok friends! So Blake never made it on the call and sorry it was cut off suddenly in the last few minutes because of an internet glitch. Here's the YouTube link of Victoria and I talking, and the YouTube description:
Victoria and M.E. Thomas swap stories about narcissistic fathers, talk about whether ASPD and BPD are a good match, talk about boundary problems with people who suffer from a personality disorder, nature vs. nurture for developing psychopathy, parallel universes and the trauma psychopaths may feel when realizing that the way they thought an experience was unfolding was really very different.
I will get back to you on the next zoom meeting as soon as I can confirm them.
I've noticed in law school that smart people with one viewpoint or ideology who surround themselves with people of an opposing viewpoint or ideology tend to be 3-5 years ahead of the general thought trend amongst the class of people who consider themselves educated (by that, I mainly mean people who read the NY Times, just because I am not sure by how else to refer to them). Philosopher Martha Nussbaum is one of these types of people. As much as I don't often agree with some of her ideas (animal rights?), hers is a rare mind that understands not just the reasons that she believes make her right, but all of the reasons that others think she is wrong. Which is sort of reassuring in reading her work. In her book Upheavals of Thought, as excerpted by Brain Pickings, she discusses the interesting interplay and intersection between agency and victimhood. True to what I just described, she anticipates some of the backlash against the cult of victimhood (published in 2001! 14 years before college students begin protesting microaggressions, amazingly prescient), but argues that the backlash goes too far -- that although identifying as a victim could be a worryingly disempowering tactic for the would-be victim, we also can't deny that people are often hurt by the world in ways that they do not deserve:
Compassion requires the judgment that there are serious bad things that happen to others through no fault of their own. In its classic tragic form, it imagines that a person possessed of basic human dignity has been injured by life on a grand scale. So it adopts a thoroughly anti-Stoic picture of the world, according to which human beings are both dignified and needy, and in which dignity and neediness interact in complex ways… The basic worth of a human being remains, even when the world has done its worst. But this does not mean that the human being has not been profoundly damaged, both outwardly and inwardly. The society that incorporates the perspective of tragic compassion into its basic design thus begins with a general insight: people are dignified agents, but they are also, frequently, victims. Agency and victimhood are not incompatible: indeed, only the capacity for agency makes victimhood tragic. In American society today, by contrast, we often hear that we have a stark and binary choice, between regarding people as agents and regarding them as victims. We encounter this contrast when social welfare programs are debated: it is said that to give people various forms of social support is to treat them as victims of life’s ills, rather than to respect them as agents, capable of working to better their own lot. *** We find the same contrast in recent feminist debates, where we are told that respecting women as agents is incompatible with a strong concern to protect them from rape, sexual harassment, and other forms of unequal treatment. To protect women is to presume that they can’t fight on their own against this ill treatment; this, in turn, is to treat them like mere victims and to undermine their dignity. […] We are offered the same contrast, again, in debates about criminal sentencing, where we are urged to think that any sympathy shown to a criminal defendant on account of a deprived social background or other misfortune such as child sexual abuse is, once again, a denial of the defendant’s human dignity. Justice Thomas, for example, went so far as to say, in a 1994 speech, that when black people and poor people are shown sympathy for their background when they commit crimes, they are being treated like children, “or even worse, treated like animals without a soul.” *** If, then, we hear political actors saying such things about women, and poor people, and racial minorities, we should first of all ask why they are being singled out: what is there about the situation of being poor, or female, or black that means that help is condescending, and compassion insulting?
She discusses why she believes people are reluctant to acknowledge true victims, essentially an application of the just world fallacy (the belief that the world must be ultimately basically fair):
The victim shows us something about our own lives: we see that we too are vulnerable to misfortune, that we are not any different from the people whose fate we are watching, and we therefore have reason to fear a similar reversal.
One thing that has been interesting about being more public about having a personality disorder that is largely loathed by a large segment of the population is the lack of compassion. The truth is that the sociopath is its own type of victim. No one chooses to have a personality disorder. A sociopath is a victim of genes and environment that triggered those genes at such an early age that the sociopath does not even remember that time period. The sociopath likely was preverbal. The sociopath for sure was an infant, toddler, or small child. The sociopath lacked almost any control over what was done to him or her and certainly had no understanding about the consequences of those experiences, nor had any adequate coping skills or ability to have chosen to develop otherwise.
So the agency/compassion distinction is big with sociopaths, and really all personality disorders and a lot of mental health problems that are stigmatized. On the one hand, society really must demand a certain sort of responsibility for actions and conformity to basic rules of behavior (i.e. agency), even from those who have different brain wiring. Ok, but why do we have to hate people with different brain wiring? The agency/compassion distinction does not mean that they're mutually exclusive, right? Can't we both have compassion for people and hold them responsible for their actions? Or I guess a slightly different question is, can't we hold people responsible for their actions without necessarily blaming them for their actions?
Sociopaths have a reputation for thinking that they're better than everyone else. Not true (or at least I don't think it is, I don't know a sufficient sample size of sociopaths). Even if it's "true-ish", I believe that it's much more nuanced than that. Sociopaths do suffer from delusions of grandeur, yes, but they're not necessarily a comparative delusion of "I'm better than you" so much as "aren't I great?" or even the slightly more comparative but still within a narrow niche of applicability "nobody could have pulled that off like I just did." Second, it's not a thought so much as it is a feeling of self-love and admiration. When it comes to a sociopath's actual thoughts, sociopaths, at least the grown-up mature ones, understand well that everybody is about the same in terms of meaninglessness in the grand scheme of things. It's perhaps what makes utilitarian thinking so natural and easy.
Third, and the focus of this post, I think that a lot of people might naturally believe that a sociopath needs feelings of superiority in order to justify his behavior or self-love. Also not true. In order for empaths to be cold and cruel, they often need to lean on their pseudo-science understanding concepts of "survival of the fittest" or as one commenter recently wondered "trample or be trampled". But sociopaths don't have to logically talk themselves into this sort of behavior the same way that no one has to logically talk anyone into falling in love with their newborn. That's just the way sociopaths are wired. And there is no real logic to this sort of bastardization of "survival of the fittest" way of thinking. Nature is not some hardwired meritocracy that values objectively "superior" traits over "inferior" ones. Your worth is almost entirely contextual and based on scarcity and demand at that particular moment. If you're the only electrician in the world, you'll be a king. If everyone is an electrician, you are nothing. If you're one of the few in the world who can flawlessly sing high C's, you're an opera star. If everyone could, you're nothing. Society is in constant state of flux in terms of what is values and what it needs. The most we could say is that for a particular problem or feat, you also could be the "only one who could pull this off". Forgive the oversimplification, but all Darwinism says is that the more diverse a species is, the more robustly it encounters external opposition or change. It's as if we all drew from the genetic lottery and we have no idea what the truly "winning" ticket will be until nature and chance draws it (and keeps drawing it from day to day). Sociopaths win at different things than normal people only because their lottery ticket has different numbers and due to their relative scarcity. Nobody has a clue who will survive until it happens, so it's pretty foolish to make an assertions about people being "worthy" to survive or not.
I also liked this recent comment responding to the trample or be trampled question:
I knew a guy at university who was so insecure and trying to look clever and tough, he went on and on at a party, where people were tripping, about 'the law of the jungle' and 'survival of the fittest'. People were coming out of the room dazed and worried because they were almost convinced that it was therefore OK to kill him because he was irritating them. I had to talk them down because even though I used to be a nice person, I agreed this guy needed to be removed from the gene pool, but lets leave that to the decision of the insecure fat girls he was always creeping on to.
Some birds have evolved such that their chicks will, as the first act of their life, murder their foster siblings. Caught on film:
Obvious questions: Are the chicks evil? Do they have free will, mens rea, etc? If there is a God, we should do a class action suit against him.
See also these comments on the recent Walking Dead episode (spoilers). When is killing wrong and when is it right? And who decides, based on what subjective perception of the world?
As a follow-up to its stories on Colonel Russell Williams, The Globe and Mail investigates "How a Psychopath is Made." There are the usual suspects trotted out to give their two cents, and these interesting insights into how sociopaths grow from child to adult.
The theory is that neglect, abuse and early trauma somehow desensitize children to the feelings of others, says Dr. Kiehl, but it still has not been proven. Not all psychopaths had horrible childhoods. Some come from stable families. Millions of children are abused he says, but don't become psychopaths.
In one of her studies, Dr. Gao found that children who lived apart from their parents in the first three years of life were more likely to have psychopathic personalities. This suggests that failure to bond may play a role, she says. She also found that adults who reported they were neglected by their mothers when they were children were also more likely to have difficulty with empathy, and other psychopathic traits.
But every child showing signs of callousness and fearlessness isn't a psychopath in the making – although it certainly increases the odds. It is rare for people to become callous and unfeeling as adults if they began life as caring, empathetic children, says Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, who studies anti-social behaviour and develops therapies for anti-social children. These troubled kids learn to conform quickly, often even fooling researchers by posing as model citizens until the end of the day, when, denied a reward, they become nasty intimidators even with adults.
But one study that followed 12-year-olds with these traits into adulthood found that only about 20 per cent met the measurement for psychopathy. Genes may lay the foundation, but environment builds upon it. A fearless child with callous traits who lives in a stable, supportive home with a parents that can afford to send him skiing as an outlet for his risk-taking has better outcomes than one raised in a poor family where the parents have few resources.
In the past, it was argued that psychopaths could not be treated – therapy sessions appeared to have no impact on their recidivism rates, and they often emerged having learned new skills about human nature that made them better manipulators. Some new research, however, has shown progress in teaching empathy to young children, as well as the benefits of very intense therapy for adult criminals.
It's interesting thinking what might trigger sociopath genes in an otherwise relatively normal child. Yes, abuse or severe neglect, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. I've already talked about some of the banal details of my childhood that may have triggered a predisposition to sociopathic traits, including possibly a particularly serious case of colic. Perhaps the colic interfered with normal maternal bonding, perhaps I sensed a more urgent need to compete for resources than normal people, but I understand how these explanations might fail to be convincing.
People always think there are going to be graphic, horror stories from my childhood, but there just aren't. I can imagine how frustrating that might be to those looking for an easy explanation, but disturbed or disordered people often have surprisingly normal backgrounds. For instance, when asked to discuss his own past, Col. Williams, perhaps anticipating the disappointment that his answers might elicit, responded almost apologetically, “it will be very boring.”
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Truth: nature wills discord. From Immanuel Kant's "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View" (1784):
The means employed by Nature to bring about the development of all the capacities of men is their antagonism in society, so far as this is, in the end, the cause of a lawful order among men. By “antagonism” I mean the unsocial sociability of men, i.e., their propensity to enter into society, bound together with a mutual opposition which constantly threatens to break up the society. Man has an inclination to associate with others, because in society he feels himself to be more than man, i.e., as more than the developed form of his natural capacities. But he also has a strong propensity to isolate himself from others, because he finds in himself at the same time the unsocial characteristic of wishing to have everything go according to his own wish. Thus he expects opposition on all sides because, in knowing himself, he knows that he, on his own part, is inclined to oppose others. This opposition it is which awakens all his powers, brings him to conquer his inclination to laziness and, propelled by vainglory, lust for power, and avarice, to achieve a rank among his fellows whom he cannot tolerate but from whom he cannot withdraw. Thus are taken the first true steps from barbarism to culture, which consists in the social worth of man; thence gradually develop all talents, and taste is refined; through continued enlightenment the beginnings are laid for a way of thought which can in time convert the coarse, natural disposition for moral discrimination into definite practical principles, and thereby change a society of men driven together by their natural feelings into a moral whole. Without those in themselves unamiable characteristics of unsociability from whence opposition springs-characteristics each man must find in his own selfish pretensions-all talents would remain hidden, unborn in an Arcadian shepherd’s life, with all its concord, contentment, and mutual affection. Men, good-natured as the sheep they herd, would hardly reach a higher worth than their beasts; they would not fill the empty place in creation by achieving their end, which is rational nature. Thanks be to Nature, then, for the incompatibility, for heartless competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess and to rule! Without them, all the excellent natural capacities of humanity would forever sleep, undeveloped. Man wishes concord; but Nature knows better what is good for the race; she wills discord. He wishes to live comfortably and pleasantly; Nature wills that he should be plunged from sloth and passive contentment into labor and trouble, in order that he may find means of extricating himself from them. The natural urges to this, the sources of unsociableness and mutual opposition from which so many evils arise, drive men to new exertions of their forces and thus to the manifold development of their capacities. They thereby perhaps show the ordering of a wise Creator and not the hand of an evil spirit, who bungled in his great work or spoiled it out of envy.
I have gotten a lot of flack for being ruthless, for ruining people, for going after my enemies with full force of mind and spirit, and particularly for enjoying it all (would Jesus do that? the God of the Old Testament seems to). What do we think of soldiers who enjoy killing? Monsters? What do we think of people who love beating their opponent soundly? Antisocial? What do we think of people who think that they are the best at what they do? Narcissists? Delusional? What do we think of people who are willing to get their hands dirty in order to achieve their goals? Primitive? Evil? One of my favorite things is to be beaten by a worthy opponent, so I have a hard time understanding when other people claim to be the "victim" of a sociopath who happened to, for example, outplay them at politics at work, or in a child custody battle, or business partnership, or any number of skirmishes that are necessary for the world to function as it currently does. I know that some people loathe the fact that this is life, that it makes us no better than animals. I love Kant's suggestion that it is exactly the opposite -- this antagonism is what prompts humans to strive to achieve something more than living like animals.
Along those same lines, from this NY Times article "Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?" (which hilariously suggests that primitive/poor are the only possible explanations for their particular brand of "antisocial" living):
“It is very difficult to interpret their behavior based on our own 20th-century standards,” Alain Behr, a defense lawyer who represented two of the accused clan chiefs, explained by telephone from Nancy. “This community crosses time and space with its traditions, and we in Europe have trouble to integrate them. Yet they have preserved their tradition, which is one of survival.”
A reader writes about his sociopathic family tree and what he believes led to his own sociopathic traits:
As a high functioning, truly, highly intelligent sociopath (well aren't we all) I.... "enjoyed" your book. I figured out years ago I was a sociopath. I have a brother who is so the definition of "narcissistic personality disorder" his picture should be next to the definition in all books. I personally always classified him as a "psychopath" as opposed to my "sociopath". Our early lives we moved every few years. Dad was in the military. My brother and I came from an abusive household. I the black sheep, and he the "good" brother. I was physically, mentally and emotionally abused. Mom as well. Little brother got his fair share of the latter two as I recall. Dad never broke any bones. Never left bruises where people could see them. His intention, His terror, was part of his Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for us. I could see the overall methodicalness of it even as a young child. Keeping us off balance with random acts of kindness and random (or expected acts) of terror. Molding us into what he wanted us to be at the time. Clarity comes with hindsight, I know now that in many ways I had a good teacher. He was a highly intelligent, highly functional man who worked a Top Secret job for the government. He's gone now, not that he'd have spoken to me about it, but with what I now know, I'm certain he was in that APD spectrum somewhere. Dad not only taught me the "ways and means" of dealing with the sociopathic tendencies, but the "ways of terror" as well. Mental, emotional, physical, all fair game in our household growing up. I always found the physical violence far to easy (I'm a big guy and can physically dominate most people easily enough) and prefer the mental and emotional manipulations more; more of a challenge. More "fun". Anyone can physically MAKE someone do something (say with a gun if nothing else), but manipulating them into WANTING to do it, far, far more satisfying. I have really never had much of a chance to actually discuss the intimate details of our "disorder" with another sociopath. All us "APD" people have similarities. A few of the similar SMALL details however, of our (yours and my and perhaps others)"condition", "blew" me away. The fake accent. Mine is a non-specific southern accent, "blunted" by many years of living in the Midwest; or so it sounds. Seems to instantly set people at ease. "He's just a good ol' boy." Hearing the consonants roll off your tongue. Funny enough, I used to do the "non-specific European" accent and dropped it for the "non-specific southern" accent, as it was proving to be far more useful and continues to be. I wonder if this is due to our "chameleon" abilities or is there some other underlying mental process that makes us change our speech? The "sharp tooth". Wow. Such a small detail, but on the mark. Likely due to our "sensation seeking". Had anyone bothered to ask, I could have told them 20+ years ago I was a dopamine junkie. I truly believe we do not produce enough dopamine, which causes us to live our lives constantly searching for some sort of stimulation, so for a brief moment we can have "peace". "Feel"......"Normal"? There were a few other small details as well that I did not expect. Playing drums and living in bad neighborhoods being two of them. Makes me wonder how much of the "us" we have is really us, not just a response to our expressed genetic heritage. I'd be curious at how many others you've communicated with have similar "accents", "sharp teeth", are good at keeping a beat and live in bad neighborhoods. I have delved into BDSM for quite a while now. Yes, surprise-surprise, I'm a Dom. Choking, pain, asphyxiation; all can certainly be "fun". Knives are "fun" as well. The sexual "deviancy" and attraction to the BDSM world is more common among APD people I've noticed. As well as MANY other mental disorders it seems. A fertile playground. Not without its downside. I've had two stalkers in the last 10 years who didn't take kindly to me just dropping them from my life. Of course what really happened was I decided it was over, and manipulated them into either leaving or stepping over the "line" and doing things there was no coming back from. That cost/benefit analysis can be a bitch sometimes. Mostly for others. In this day and age of sarcasm and violence, I often just speak the truth now. Just like the person you quoted in your book. People think I'm joking. At worst, I have a slightly "off" or "dark" brand of humor. "What are you thinking?", she asks. "I'm wondering what kind of noises you'd make if I held you down and bit a chunk out of your shapely ass." She laughs. I was telling the truth.
I'm really not sure why I'm writing this email. Certainly curiosity. I have never shared this information with anyone. In some way perhaps its comforting to know I'm not alone in my "uniqueness".
This New York Times article states the obvious -- bad parents can't take all the credit for good children and good parents can't take all the blame for bad children. Interestingly, it goes out of its way to say that bad behavior does not necessarily equal sociopathy:
“I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” the patient told me. She was an intelligent and articulate woman in her early 40s who came to see me for depression and anxiety. In discussing the stresses she faced, it was clear that her teenage son had been front and center for many years. When he was growing up, she explained, he fought frequently with other children, had few close friends, and had a reputation for being mean. She always hoped he would change, but now that he was almost 17, she had a sinking feeling. I asked her what she meant by mean. “I hate to admit it, but he is unkind and unsympathetic to people,” she said, as I recall. He was rude and defiant at home, and often verbally abusive to family members. Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range, with no evidence of any learning disability or mental illness. Naturally, she wondered if she and her husband were somehow remiss as parents. Here, it seems, they did not fare as well as their son under psychiatric scrutiny. One therapist noted that they were not entirely consistent around their son, especially when it came to discipline; she was generally more permissive than her husband. Another therapist suggested that the father was not around enough and hinted that he was not a strong role model for his son. But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents? To be sure, they had a fundamentally different relationship with their difficult child. My patient would be the first to admit that she was often angry with him, something she rarely experienced with his brothers. But that left open a fundamental question: If the young man did not suffer from any demonstrable psychiatric disorder, just what was his problem? My answer may sound heretical, coming from a psychiatrist. After all, our bent is to see misbehavior as psychopathology that needs treatment; there is no such thing as a bad person, just a sick one. But maybe this young man was just not a nice person. For years, mental health professionals were trained to see children as mere products of their environment who were intrinsically good until influenced otherwise; where there is chronic bad behavior, there must be a bad parent behind it. But while I do not mean to let bad parents off the hook — sadly, there are all too many of them, from malignant to merely apathetic — the fact remains that perfectly decent parents can produce toxic children. When I say “toxic,” I don’t mean psychopathic. . . .
I often tell readers that not every asshole ex of theirs is a sociopath, and the same applies for misbehaving children. In this situation, though, I actually think it is foolish to discount the potential role of sociopathy. There is a strong genetic but weak environmental link to sociopathy, which is consistent with having two normal sons and one sociopathic one. Furthermore, although inconsistent discipline may not be enough to cause anyone to become a sociopath, it could trigger sociopathy in someone who was genetically predisposed to it, as sociopath children are particularly sensitive to incentive structures and perceived fairness (i.e. consistency and reciprocity). I obviously don't know the full story, but just based on the article, the description fits sociopathy, at least for this kid.
After spending time with my family recently, I am more convinced that nurture had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. When people ask me whether I had a bad childhood, I tell them that it was actually relatively unremarkable, however I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up -- how my independent emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. Still I don't think I was "made" into a sociopath, nor was I born one. I feel like I was born with that predisposition, that I made a relatively conscious decision to rely on those skills instead of developing others, and that the decision was made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment. It's a bit similar to this author's description of her own survivalist adaptations:
If you’ve read much about writers, you know that many of us grew up with an alcoholic parent or in some otherwise dysfunctional home. Me, too. Kids who are raised in households where feelings of safety and predictability are up for grabs might be more likely to turn into storytellers. We spend a lot of emotional energy trying to guess what might happen next, and mentally drawing up different contingency plans. It puts us in the “what if” habit early.
Genetics are important for sociopathy, but environment plays a crucial role as well. Although the NY Times article notes that "[f]or better or worse, parents have limited power to influence their children," such that they should be reluctant "to take all the blame — or credit — for everything that their children become," unfortunately (or luckily?) they can still take quite a bit of blame (or credit) for sociopathic children, particularly with new "studies suggesting that such antisocial behavior can be modified with parental coaching." Knowledge is power.
This hour long documentary is probably worth watching, particularly for people who are just learning about sociopathy. For the sociopaths, most of it will seem a little over the top, but for some reason that passes as science and journalism when it comes to the dreaded sociopath.
Interesting moments:
27:42 What sociopaths are doing/thinking when they are talking to you.
31:14 Nature vs. nurture -- environment alone isn't enough to create a sociopath, otherwise we'd see more sociopaths in war torn areas, also "intervening" with child sociopaths.
34:40 Biological basis for the condition.
42:40 Treatment.
45:05 Mandatory brain chips and/or "surgical intervention" for sociopaths.
Microchips in the brain is by far the scariest idea I have even heard of to "deal" with the "psychopath problem," and I have heard of a lot of creative ones involving islands, internment camps, or specialized soldiers. My favorite comment:
“we will replace ‘dysfunctional’ brain mechanisms with microchips” what the…!?!?!?!!! no you wont, i’ll quite happily be labelled as psychotic for violently opposing such an idea! ultimate mind control! ill be thankful for some violent psychopaths when the powers that be try that one!!!! The moral authority of these guys is terrifying to say the least it absolves them as ‘normal’ people, my definition of psychopath would include anyone who thinks mind control chips are an acceptable course of action!
microchip control for difficult people who dont fit into a society that worships money and rewards the ‘industrial psychopaths’ with untold riches. i wonder if we are all a little bit psychotic and these therapists are the abnormal ones in trying to standardise emotional response to life events- prescribing that any given situation has a ‘proper’ emotionally standard response? the guy who describes the psychopaths abnormality as reading someone else’s faces and tailoring what they say in response- like this is some sort of weird anomaly. pathologically frightened control freaks are what the therapists come across as by their own diagnostic criteria, desperately seeking to reign in the personalities they cannot understand. i’ve watched some scary documentaries by alex jones et al about social control but this one is far more frightening in its implications. eugenics is alive and well, cull the abnormal, praise be to the sheepthinkers.
A reader suggested this Morgan Freeman narrated special "Through the Wormhole: Can We Eliminate Evil?" Not surprisingly, it features sociopaths and studies on the brain that give interesting insight to how we decide what to do and what constitutes evil.
I just finished reading your book and I wanted to say that I found it utterly fascinating. I am not a sociopath but I definitely displayed antisocial traits as a child. Perhaps if my childhood had been different I would have ended up different. I enjoyed reading your points of view on nature and nurture for antisocial children. But more than anything I appreciate the perspective you brought on the issue of sociopaths in society. Before reading your book I never truly recognized the unfair bias and often outright double standards (I have multiple aspies in my family) society places upon sociopaths. Being a member of the gay community I am well aware that it was not so long ago that I would have been considered a "monster" or "deviant". Maybe one day more people will see that there are good, highly functioning sociopaths out there just like there are violent and dangerous ones--as is the case for any variant of humans.
I remember I took a psychology class in college, just for the hell of it, and on a test we were asked to write several paragraphs about what we believed to be the worst of the personality disorders. I thought it was silly because there is no unbendable mold for psychological disorders; they can be good, bad, or both. Most people in my class wrote that sociopaths were the worst kinds of people and I wrote that if I had to choose, I would list BPD as the worst. My teacher actually pulled me aside and asked me to further explain why I felt that way. I guess many others listed socios because of the link to violence and people with BPD are not typically known to be violent. The only reason I had was personal experience; I've known several sociopaths and remain friends with some of them, but everyone I've known that had BPD was just awful. Awful in a sense of massively annoying and using extreme emotions to manipulate--often resulting in hysterics and acts of self-harm. All of which I found extremely time-consuming and obnoxious. I'm sure there are BPDs out there that aren't bad--I just haven't met any yet. I've never talked at length with my socio friends about how they think or process things--I just know they are different and leave it at that. Thank you for providing insight I might otherwise have never been exposed to.
This is an interesting lecture from philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris about how the common conception of free will is not scientifically supported. Specifically he debunks two assumptions on the popular conception of free will: (1) we are each free to think and act differently than we did in the past ("you became a police man, but you could have become a firefighter") and (2) we are the conscious source of our thoughts and actions, i.e. we feel like we want to do something so we do that thing. The problem with these assumptions is that "Everything that could possibly constitute your will is either the product of a long chain of prior causes, so you're not responsible for them, or it's the product of randomness, and you're not responsible for that, obviously, or it's some combination of the two."
He has an interesting analogy at the beginning about a man sleeping in a park and getting his face bitten off by an alligator versus a man with the axe. The result is the same, but people hate the man and not the crocodile because wWhat else is a crocodile going to do, coming upon you napping in the park" whereas a man is allegedly in control of his actions.
Another interesting assertion: "Most people imagine that a belief in free will is necessary for morality. . . . The difference between happiness and suffering exists without free will." Still, there are a lot of interesting implications for morality. At 46:00 he talks about how we can make reasonable distinctions between premeditated and impulsive crime given that free will doesn't exist. punishment, morality, etc.
"In specific cases we have already changed our view of evil. Whenever we see the cause of someone's behavior, when we see for instance that a murderer had a brain tumor . . . so as to explain his violent impulses, that person suddenly becomes a victim of biology. Our moral intuitions shift utterly. Now I'm arguing that a brain tumor is just a special case of physical events giving rise to thoughts and actions. If we fully understood the neurophysiology of any murderer's brain, it would be as exculpatory as finding a tumor in it. If we could see how the wrong genes were being relentlessly transcribed, if we could see how his early life experience had sculpted the micro structure in his brain in just such a way as to give rise to violent impulses, the whole conception of placing blame on him would erode."
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