I thought this was an interesting recent comment:
The gravest accusation against sociopaths from the "empath-world" seems to be that "aware socios" are said to be very satisfied with their mental condition; if they could remove their psychopathy by pushing a button, they would not do so. Sick folks enjoying their disease! Isn't this somehow a little unfair: how many empaths would remove "supernatural gifts" they discovered one morning: if they could read others minds or see through walls? Most likely not many. All those movies about superheroes, what are they really about? Answer: human longing to be godlike. But socios are not allowed to have that wish. Somehow they are supposed to daydream about other things..
The gravest accusation against sociopaths from the "empath-world" seems to be that "aware socios" are said to be very satisfied with their mental condition; if they could remove their psychopathy by pushing a button, they would not do so. Sick folks enjoying their disease! Isn't this somehow a little unfair: how many empaths would remove "supernatural gifts" they discovered one morning: if they could read others minds or see through walls? Most likely not many. All those movies about superheroes, what are they really about? Answer: human longing to be godlike. But socios are not allowed to have that wish. Somehow they are supposed to daydream about other things..
I had a little bit of a similar discussion with someone recently. Specifically, they were asking me about this statement in the book "I have chosen to call myself a sociopath because of the negative connotations of psycho in the popular culture. I may have a disorder, but I am not crazy." They assumed that I thought that being thought crazy was something that was even worse than being thought sociopath. I didn't mean that at all. Crazy is just different. In fact, in some ways, I wish that my craziness was more obvious to people in a way that psychosis often is, it would certainly help them to keep more of an open mind about me. Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems that if I most people had a cousin with schizophrenia, they'd just be like -- oh, yeah, he has mental problems, this is not who he "really is." Or they might wonder where the line between mental disorder stops and he starts. Maybe they would think that it's impossible to tell who the cousin really is because it's impossible to filter out the disorder from the underlying person. And with someone who is obviously crazy, it seems like people pretty much credit anything that seems out of the ordinary to the mental problems instead of attributing it to a personality/character flaw. But with personality disorders, you get ascribed all of your disorder traits as being personality/character flaws (not altogether illogically, or course). If you are borderline, maybe you are a moody bitch. A narcissist = an egotistical control freak. A sociopath is a . . . Well, especially if the sociopath was honest in sharing his or her worldview, a sociopath would be someone who is obviously delusionally obsessed with power, both in the micro and the macro, someone whose megalomania is only matched by his pettiness and self-involvement, etc. etc. That's who you are, or at least that is who people think you are. Because that's what you look like when you have this particular disorder. They don't really understand (or don't care? or don't care to make the distinction?) that those are just the symptoms of your disorder.
