Friday, July 8, 2011

Anatomy of a murderer

This was an interesting interview with Bill James, author of the new book, "Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence." It had the following gems:

  • Crimes stories are universally interesting. They reveal a side of people that we'd not otherwise talk about. Crime stories show us the part of people's lives they try to keep hidden.
  • In a lot of true crime stories, you will see that someone testifies for the defendant and talks about what a good person they are, and that this person could never commit the crime in question. I would like to think of myself as someone who would never commit a crime. I'm sure a lot of people would. But I don't think that's a good argument for anything. If I was on a jury, the claim that the accused was "too good a person" to commit the crime would not be an argument I would buy. Rabbis commit crimes. Ministers. Priests commit terrible crimes. Now, are they committing these crimes because they're not really good people and they're just pretending to be good, or are they truly good people who simply fail to deal with certain situations? I think the latter is more often the case.
  • in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.
  • It is not as if we walk through one doorway and decide that murder is acceptable. You have to walk through many doorways. The first doorway leads to a party, where people are doing drugs and having fun. The second doorway leads to more partying. It's a long, long series of doorways, until you end up in a room where a terrible thing happens. So the question is, "How many doorways away are you?" It's not a question about a person's capacity to commit a murder. It's a question of how many doorways we keep between ourselves and that situation.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Niche

As sort of a follow-up from the last post, I thought this article about finding jobs suitable for people with autism/asperger's (and the correspondingly more productive societal role) had some interesting implications for the usefulness of sociopaths in any given culture. A man talks about how he founded a company that specializes in finding specialties for auties, prompted by his own autistic son:
“If others could appreciate his skills and respect his special personality in a meaningful and productive job, then we could go to the grave with a good conscience.”
***
The idea for Specialisterne came to Sonne after he got involved with an autism support organization and met scores of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (A.S.D.). There are large variations within this spectrum: it includes people who are significantly challenged as well as some who, on the surface, seem perfectly average and are often very intelligent. People with A.S.D. have problems imagining other people’s feelings and grasping social contexts; they struggle or may be unable to read social cues like facial expressions or sarcasm. They usually have narrowly defined interests, engage in repetitive behaviors, and are resistant to changes in routine. And they are highly sensitive to stress and vulnerable to depression.
***
“I think that everyone has resources that society can benefit from under the right circumstances,” explains Sonne. However, among those with high-functioning autism, he notes, it is easier to make this case. Sonne saw that Lars, at age 7, had an unusual aptitude for copying details from books by memory. Having spent years working in the field of information technology, he knew that the strengths that often come with A.S.D. — such as a talent for intense focus and concentration, an ability to recognize patterns, spot minute deviances and recall details, and a perseverance for repetitive tasks — could be advantages in jobs where consistency and accuracy are paramount. Software testing and data conversion and management were obvious examples.
***
Sonne calls it the “dandelion philosophy.” Depending on your point of view, a dandelion is either a valuable herb — a source of iron and vitamin A, with many medicinal qualities — or a weed that invades your garden. “A weed is a beautiful plant in an unwanted place,” he says. “An herb is the same plant where it is wanted. Who decides if something is a weed or an herb? Society does.”
Most parents of children with autism or asperger's do not like the lack of empathy comparisons between their children and sociopaths. I wonder if Sonne is really so willing to stand by his statement that everyone has resources that society can benefit from, including sociopaths. Maybe there should be a similar employment placement service for sociopaths...

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Learning disabled?

A reader writes:
I wonder if the way the brain is organized plays a role in defining the personality? Isn't it possible that someone who struggles to read, or has some other learning challenges, also organizes and processes emotions and social cues differently?

The current approach to evaluating personality types seems like not much more than a game of battleship where you ignore misses to make sense of the hits. We assume that with enough therapy, or desire, personality is something we can change, without taking into account how we learn and navigate reality. That's a bit like having the body type of a sprinter and training for long distance running. Maybe we just are what we are?

According to this link, when the right brain becomes overstimulated, individuals become "anxious, pessimistic, and tense".

So, does an anxious and pessimistic individual have an anxious and pessimistic personality, or just an excessively active right hemisphere? I wonder if sociopathic personalities are right brained individuals, and for this reason are more impulsive and prone to risk taking than their left brained brethren? Or do they have their own unique hardwiring?

The brain is like a computer. Everything depends on its ability to input, process, store, and retrieve information. Understanding that hardwiring might allow us to develop new approaches to learning and to even "change".

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Women who love sociopaths

In response to the previous post about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Slate article about his wife and other women who love socipaths:
Why have Catherine Greig, the girlfriend of mobster Whitey Bulger, and Anne Sinclair, the wife of accused rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, stood by their men? I’m going to play amateur psychiatrist and declare both men appear to be sociopaths. There’s not much doubt with Bulger, who is allegedly behind at least 19 murders and even by the standards of professional criminals was considered to be particularly vicious. Granted, Strauss-Kahn, until his recent indictment on rape charges, was a highly successful international bureaucrat possibly on his way to becoming president of France. Yet his wife surely knew about his obsessive, compulsive philandering. Did she never hear word that the Great Seducer sometimes forced himself on the unwilling? She certainly now knows that the night he spent in the Sofitel he propositioned two female employees, who rebuffed him, before his encounter with the maid. If the press leaks are accurate, his defense against the rape charge may be that the sexual encounter with the woman who came to clean his room was consensual. Yet it is Sinclair’s money which is making his defense possible. Given the costs of his luxurious house arrest, his security, his lawyers, his investigators, she could be sinking $1 million a month into trying to clear a husband whose treatment of women is pathological. Sinclair, who has brains, beauty, ambition, and money, stepped aside from her successful career as a journalist to help Strauss-Kahn’s rise. I imagine, now that she is in her 60s, she loathes the idea of a future as an aging single woman, left off the guest list for the best parties. But at what point do you stop defending the indefensible?
What does that even mean? Is there some objective definition of what qualifies behavior as "indefensible"? I mean, if they're into their wayward partners, that's their choice, right?

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Dominque Strauss-Kahn

I actually don't know if I can speak for him, but his accuser has some very tell-tale sociopath signs. From the New York Times under the headline, "Strauss-Kahn Accuser’s Call Alarmed Prosecutors," the story starts with a phone call made to her boyfriend in immigration jail 28 hours after the assault:
‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing."

It was another ground-shifting revelation in a continuing series of troubling statements, fabrications and associations that unraveled the case and upended prosecutors’ view of the woman. Once, in the hours after she said she was attacked on May 14, she’d been a “very pious, devout Muslim woman, shattered by this experience,” the official said — a seemingly ideal witness.

Little by little, her credibility as a witness crumbled — she had lied about her immigration, about being gang raped in Guinea, about her experiences in her homeland and about her finances, according to two law enforcement officials. She had been linked to people suspected of crimes. She changed her account of what she did immediately after the encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn. Sit-downs with prosecutors became tense, even angry. Initially composed, she later collapsed in tears and got down on the floor during questioning. She became unavailable to investigators from the district attorney’s office for days at a time.

Now the phone call raised yet another problem: it seemed as if she hoped to profit from whatever occurred in Suite 2806.
***
In the beginning, her relationship with prosecutors was strong. Her account seemed solid. Over time, the well-placed official said, they discovered that she was capable of telling multiple, inconsistent versions of what appeared to be important episodes in her life.
***
Her immigration history was a focus. At first, she told them what she told immigration officials seven years ago in her accounts of how she fled Guinea and her application for asylum on Dec. 30, 2004. She described soldiers destroying the home where she lived with her husband, and said they were both beaten because of their opposition to the regime. She said her husband died in jail.

But then, in a subsequent interview with Manhattan prosecutors, she said the story was false, one she had been urged to tell by a man who gave it to her on a cassette recording to memorize. She had listened to the recording repeatedly.

The housekeeper also told investigators that she had been gang raped in Guinea. She cried and became “markedly distraught when recounting the incident,” according to a letter to the defense from prosecutors released Friday. But she later admitted that that, too, was a lie, once again one she had told to help her application for asylum. She said she was indeed raped in Guinea, but not in the way she had described.
Apparently she was lying for her asylum application, and of course not everyone who lies on an asylum application is a sociopath, but that combined with her fluency of lying, her ability and willingness to exploit a powerful wealthy man and in a rather cunning way all suggest that she is somewhere on the spectrum.
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