Friday, June 24, 2011

Too smart


I have been thinking recently about what it means to be very smart. I always score in the 99th percentile of standardized tests. I have a job that is very prestige oriented, for which you have to be smart, brilliant even. And I'm actually very good at my job. Some of my friends that know about the blog and me being a sociopath wonder if maybe I'm not a sociopath at all, maybe I am just smart -- too smart to get caught up in the emotional muck that most people are mired in?

I don't know, it makes me wonder, and it sort of makes me anxious to think that my intelligence would have such a profound effect on the way I perceive the world, the way I move in the world.

I have mixed feelings about being so smart. It's sometimes hard to get out of my head and a lot of the time people don't really respect it, they look down on me for it unless they're prestige whores and then they're not the type of person I would even want to be impressed.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Seeing psychopaths for what they are

A reader sent this very long selection from "The Psychopath Test", which appears to have the most salient parts. Some selections:
Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you're trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was.
***
Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a bit psychopathic. I was starting to see the checklist as an intoxicating weapon that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. And I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands.

I met up with Hare again. "It's quite a power you bestow upon people," I said. "What if you've created armies of people who spot psychopaths where there are none, witchfinder generals of the psychopath-spotting world?"
***
Journalists hardly ever made it to a DSPD unit and I was curious to see inside. According to Maden, the chief clinician at Tony's unit, it wouldn't exist without Hare's psychopath check-list. Tony was there because he had scored high on it, as had all 300 DSPD patients. The official line was that these were places to treat psychopaths with a view to one day sending them back out into the world. But the widespread theory was the whole thing was in fact a scheme to keep psychopaths locked up for life.
***
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.
***
"Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I've believed that psychopaths are monsters," I said. "They're just psychopaths – it's what defines them, it's what they are." I paused. "But isn't Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A grey area? Doesn't his story prove that people in the middle shouldn't necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?"

"I think that's right," he replied. "Personally, I don't like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species. . . . I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label. Tony has many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label."

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Unmasked

People frequently ask what I get out of writing the blog. There are a lot of reasons, but a major one is to be able to shape the debate about "the psychopath problem." I care about public perception of psychopaths because I believe that it will become increasingly difficult for sociopaths to stay hidden, perhaps through genetic testing, or even by identifying sociopathic patterns in personal information the same way that certain financial accounting practices make fraud easily identifiable. Under the headline "Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone," the NY Times reports:
Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived.

Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.

A commuter in the New York area who verbally tangled with a conductor last Tuesday — and defended herself by asking “Do you know what schools I’ve been to and how well-educated I am?” — was publicly identified after a fellow rider posted a cellphone video of the encounter on YouTube. The woman, who had gone to N.Y.U., was ridiculed by a cadre of bloggers, one of whom termed it the latest episode of “Name and Shame on the Web.”

Women who were online pen pals of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner similarly learned how quickly Internet users can sniff out all the details of a person’s online life. So did the men who set fire to cars and looted stores in the wake of Vancouver’s Stanley Cup defeat last week when they were identified, tagged by acquaintances online.

The collective intelligence of the Internet’s two billion users, and the digital fingerprints that so many users leave on Web sites, combine to make it more and more likely that every embarrassing video, every intimate photo, and every indelicate e-mail is attributed to its source, whether that source wants it to be or not. This intelligence makes the public sphere more public than ever before and sometimes forces personal lives into public view.
There are already examples of websites dedicated solely and single-mindedly to outting sociopaths, Lovefraud comes to mind. Those sites don't scare me because no one serious takes them seriously. If sociopaths could be identified through internet or other activity, though, that could mean an entirely different way of life for most of us. For better or for worse?

Monday, June 20, 2011

The perverse inner world of babies

I find babies to be charming, but I also don't ascribe to them the innocence that most do, in fact this is probably why I like them so much. For being such little things, they can be so damn clever. Some of their more perverse behaviors are a good rejoinder to those who scream that psychopaths are murderous, manipulative, evil devil's span when it turns out, if those are your criteria for devil's span, we all are. Cracked.com, "6 Shockingly Evil Things Babies Are Capable Of" includes lying, prejudice, defiance, getting high, stealing, and my favorite -- murder:
For a long time scientists had a theory that left handed people might have started out as twins in the womb. Their rationale was that in a set of twins one tends to be right handed and one left handed. Genetic and nurturing factors can also affect handedness, but they can't explain it completely in many cases. Maybe all lefties were the result of only one twin surviving the cage fight that is fetal development.

It wasn't until ultrasounds, and fearless cameras capable of surviving the uterus, that scientists discovered their hunch was right. Sort of. They were right in the fact that most lefties were once twins but they didn't go far enough. Scientists now think that a ridiculous one in eight people started out as two peas in a pod. Of course, only about one in 70 people actually is a twin. So what happened to your twin? You killed it and then absorbed it into your body. Yeah, those stories of adults finding teeth in their shoulder? Not urban legends.

Why Did I Do That?!
Because you're evil.

Not really. Chances are you were just the healthier fetus. Or you hogged all the blood if you shared a placenta. Or you grew faster and literally left your sibling no womb at the inn. If multiple pregnancies are really as common as they now seem, we evolved to be this way for a reason. Trying out two fetuses to see which one is more likely to survive is a pretty good plan evolutionarily. Unfortunately, carrying twins is very dangerous for the mother, meaning that our best bet as a species was to let one twin kill off the other early on in development. Just another reason lefties are a sinister, sinister group of people.
I trained my one-year-old relative how to carry a knife in her teeth commando style. It was hilarious. That babies must be trained to stop doing certain bad things, socialized to do "good" is not surprising. Of course they have a limited capacity to be good, at least a limited capacity to fight against what they have been evolutionarily programmed to do. This should not surprise us, as adults have similar difficulties in eschewing "evil" acts, but again for good evolutionary reasons. Does this suggest that we should reconsider how we define evil to exclude all evolutionary inclinations? And if so, how would the psychopathy fit in that equation? I guess the terms "humanize" and "demonize" are not the polar opposites that had been previously supposed.
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