Detection, prevention, isolation of the threat

I thought this had fun parallels. Under the headline, "Scientists Find 'Liberal Gene,'" studies done by the University of California at San Diego and Harvard indicate that if a person has a certain gene (DRD4, a seratonin receptor gene associated with novelty seeking) AND if one that person had many friends in adolescence, that person will become politically liberal/left leaning.

This means a couple things. First that leftists/liberals cannot be blamed for any of their more extreme actions. Unfortunately for them and for society, there is no hope of curing them. By the time they have reached adolescence, the damage has already been done.

Second, what should we be doing about prevention? Society cannot tolerate a significant portion of the population being genetically predisposed to hate and persecute half the rest of the population. An extreme situation such as this one requires extreme measures to correct it. The first step would be to start screening and aborting fetuses that test positive for DRD4. For the existing children with the DRD4 gene, they should immediately be shipped off to camps where they are kept in solitary confinement. In the alternative, they should be given really bad haircuts, bad taste in music, a dead tooth or other facial disfigurement, and be force fed junk food until they become morbidly obese and incur skin problems. Either that or be home schooled. Anything to prevent them from having that threshold number of friends. It may sound horrifying to some, but the payoff would be big. And after they have suffered a humiliating adolescence, we can consider them "reclaimed" and integrate them back into society under a careful, watchful eye.

As for the adults who test positive for DRD4, we should institutionalize them indefinitely until they become to burdensome on society at which point we should start talking "final solution."

Just a thought.

Sociopaths in the media: Mark Zuckerberg, Lisbeth Salander

One "non-fictional" sort of, the other fictional.

I haven't seen it yet, but my friend says that the protagonist in The Social Network is "clearly some sort of path." This guy agrees:

"Punk. Genius. Traitor. Billionaire." So says the ubiquitous poster for The Social Network (aka the Facebook film) of the service's founder. There's one more word they don't use but should have: Sociopath.

The Mark Zuckerberg of David Fincher's masterful film is angry, lonely, vindictive and vengeful. He's the classic outsider looking in, an unlikable anti-hero with only one redeeming feature – a superb brain. He's a variation on Tyler Durden, the central character of Fincher's Fight Club, with just a shade of Kevin Spacey's John Doe from Fincher's earlier Se7en. As played so brilliantly by Jesse Eisenberg, this Zuckerberg simply doesn't like people much. How ironic, then, that he should end up, as another poster for the film puts it, with 500 million friends.

I actually had an idea for my own social networking site. It involved spying on other people's IM conversations. It never got funding, unfortunately, but it's not that much of a stretch to believe that Mark Zuckerberg leans socio. Moving target privacy policy, anyone? But what about his charitable works? I think you can file those under "maintaining image" right next to Angelina Jolie.

Curiously, the game platform that hopes to be Facebook's biggest competitor is actually named SocioPath.

I love Scandanavian film, for obvious reasons. I haven't read the books, but I love Noomi Rapace's rendition of the very sociopathic Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She's bisexual, she just does things, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad, she makes her living as a fringe criminal, outside the box thinker, and a seductress. I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but a victim using rape as an offensive weapon? Very creative! Worth seeing.

Sociopaths in the news: Russell Williams

Colonel David Russell Williams of the Canadian Air Force recently pled guilty to various crimes, including murder. As reported by The Star:

By day, Russell Williams was the commander of Canada’s biggest air force base, CFB Trenton. By night, he broke into homes, taking pictures of himself modeling the bras and panties of little girls.

He escalated quickly, from fetish break-ins, to sex assaults with no penetration to rape and murder. He logged his crimes, kept track of police reports of his crimes and left notes and messages for his victims. “Merci,” he thanked a 12-year-old in a typed message on her computer.

“Merci beaucoup,” he captioned a souvenir photo he took of his penis strapped to a sex toy he stole from a 24-year-old Ottawa victim in June 2008.

We learned that Williams made a video of his brutal beating and asphyxiation of Comeau after breaking into her home Nov. 24, 2009. He also made sex tapes of Lloyd after kidnapping her the night of Jan. 28, taking her to his cottage in Tweed, raping and torturing her for at least a day before dumping her corpse in a field.

Although sociopaths are notoriously difficult to diagnose even for a trained psychological professional,the Col. David Russell Williams case has several hallmarks of sociopathic behavior. To friends, families, and co-workers, he seemed to be a successful leader in the community. He was outwardly admired for his strengths and his commitment to community and service were almost too perfect. Given his arrest for a string of crimes including two murders, however, it seems clear that his public persona was nothing more than a mask to hide his true identity. This is protypical behavior of a murderous sociopath.

Even more confirming of such a diagnosis would be his actions subsequent to his arrest. You would expect sociopaths when cornered to deny all allegations made against them, scrambling to come up with any plausible explanation for their behavior. A trapped sociopath will seem unflappable, confidently asserting his innocence. He is only half pretending. Ever an optimist, he will have deluded himself into believing that he may still skate away unharmed. In contrast, a truly innocent man would be apprehensive upon his arrest and prosecution because even an innocent man would understand the true danger of his predicament and the possibility of wrongful prosecution. If Col. Williams has seemed largely unshaken by his turn of fortune and confident of his imminent release, this would also be a strong indicator of sociopathic behavior.

What I don't really understand is why he pled guilty. Maybe he realized that the jig was up. Maybe they had such strong evidence against him that he realized it was better to just plead out and get a lesser sentence. Or maybe he realized that he had become a monster and lost all ability to control his impulses. If so, this is yet another cautionary tale of why you should not indulge urges to the point that they get out of control.

Sociopaths in science

Some articles related to sociopathy:

A "Wired" study of monkey's brains implying a possibly physical basis for empathy:

Our brain divides space into at least two major sectors — one in which we can do things, in which we can act, and one in which we can’t," explained Marco Iacoboni, who studies the human mirror neuron system at the University of California at Los Angeles. "Our cognition, even fairly complex stuff like empathy, seems grounded in our body.

From a recent NYT article on the death of biologist George C. Williams:

Dr. Williams pursued his ideas even to results that he found disturbing. “He concluded that anything shaped by natural selection was inevitably evil because selfish organisms outproduced those that weren’t selfish,” Dr. Nesse said.

Dr. Williams acknowledged that people had moral instincts that overcome evil. But he had no patience with biologists who argue that these instincts could have been brought into being by natural selection.

“I account for morality as an accidental capability produced, in its boundless stupidity, by a biological process that is normally opposed to the expression of such a capability,” Dr. Williams wrote starkly in 1988.

Dr. Williams sounds like he was a sensible man.

Sociopath quote: the other side of the coin

Strangers can pretty much go right into any old persons' house without any permission and take them and no one really cares, which is probably terrifying if you are an old person who can barely walk. And yet probably great if you need an old person who can barely walk.

Sarah Silverman