Friday, December 19, 2014

There are no bad people

I have finally started watching Homeland, am in the second season so no spoilers in the comments. It's obviously an engaging show but I also find myself wondering not just whether it is an accurate depiction of bipolar disorder but what elements of the character are bipolar and what elements of the character are just who that person is. Like if the person gets sad over something that happened I wonder, is that how bipolar people act? Am I meant to think that this character is being histrionic? Or over emotional? Or is this supposed to be "normal" behavior?

Similarly, I think the sort of wholesale ignorance that people have about sociopaths leads them to believe all sorts of things about how the disorder must play out in the every day lives of sociopaths. Some think that we're supermen, some absolute villains, some think we're absolutely two faced and nothing truthful ever comes out of our mouths. I just don't believe that such caricatures of humanity exist. I was watching clips of Frozen this weekend with my little relatives. I don't believe the villain prince in that movie exists -- someone who is just nice and unassuming and then turns out to be absolutely two-faced and everything he did (even the nice stuff like handing out blankets to townspeople) was all for some nefarious purpose. I just don't believe that particular type of person exists.

I thought about that when I read via Brain Pickings "Dostoyevsky on Why There Are No Bad People":

We are all good fellows — except the bad ones, of course. Yet, I shall observe in passing that among us, perhaps, there are no bad people at all — maybe, only wretched ones. But we have not grown up to be bad. Don’t scoff at me, but consider: we have reached the point in the past where, because of the absence of bad people of our own (I repeat: despite the abundance of all sorts of wretches), we used to be ready, for instance, to value very highly various bad little fellows appearing among our literary characters, mostly borrowed from foreign sources. Not only did we value them, but we slavishly sought to imitate them in real life; we used to copy them, and in this respect we were ready to jump out of our skins.
***
We used to value and respect these evil people … solely due to the fact that they appeared as men of solid hate in contradiction to us Russians, who, as is well known, are people of very fragile hate, and this trait of ours we have always particularly despised. Russians are unable to hate long and seriously, and not only men but even vices — the darkness of ignorance, despotism, obscurantism and all the rest of these retrograde things. At the very first opportunity we are quick and eager to make peace… Please consider: why should we be hating each other? For evil deeds? — But this is a very slippery, most ticklish and most unjust theme — in a word, a double-edged one… Fighting is fighting, but love is love… We are fighting primarily and solely because now it is no longer a time for theories, for journalistic skirmishes, but the time for work and practical decisions.
***
A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.
***
Judge [the people] not by those villainies which they frequently perpetrate, but by those great and holy things for which they long amidst the very villainy. Besides, the people are not composed of scoundrels only; there are also genuine saints — and what saints! They themselves are radiant and they illuminate the path for all of us!
***
Somehow, I am blindly convinced that there is no such villain or scoundrel among the Russian people who wouldn’t admit that he is villainous and abominable, whereas, among others, it does happen sometimes that a person commits a villainy and praises himself for it, elevating his villainy to the level of a principle, and claiming that l’ordre and the light of civilization are precisely expressed in that abomination; the unfortunate one ends by believing this sincerely, blindly and honestly.
***
Judge [people] not by what they are, but by what they strive to become.

No wonder Dostoyevsky is so popular amongst the sociopathic crowd.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

The science of evil

I wanted to write a response to this NY Times review of Simon Baron-Cohen's book "The Science of Evil," but I already expressed most of my outrage about the book and it's theory that a lack of empathy is the root of all evil here. Today, however, there was an interesting response to both Baron-Cohen's book and Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test" by Yale professor of Psychology Paul Bloom, again in the NY Times. Under the title "I'm Ok, You're a Psychopath":
For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”
***
Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait.
***
For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. There are also narcissists, who care only about themselves, and borderlines — individuals cursed with impulsivity, an inability to control their anger and an extreme fear of abandonment. Baron-Cohen calls these three groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.

People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”

This is an intriguing proposal, but Baron-Cohen doesn’t fully elaborate on it, much less address certain obvious objections. For one thing, if people with autism can use logic to be good without empathy, why can’t smart psychopaths do the same? And what about the many low-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who lack special savant gifts and don’t spontaneously create moral codes? On Baron-Cohen’s analysis, they would be Zero-Negative. But this doesn’t seem right. Such individuals might be awkward or insensitive, but they are not actively malicious; they are much more likely to be the targets of cruelty than the perpetrators.

I think there’s a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others’ heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. . . . The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom.
Bloom goes on to criticize Baron-Cohen's theory by pointing out that everyone can suffer from a lack of empathy due to circumstances or sometimes through choice. Unfortunately Bloom does not then take the final step of questioning whether a lack of empathy should actually be the scientific definition of "evil," as Baron-Cohen advocates, but instead makes a nod to the I-hate-sociopaths camp, quoting: "'Why should we care about psychopaths? They don’t care about us.'" At least people are starting to think twice before drinking the Hare et al. Kool-Aid of fear-mongering.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

I don't think you're a sociopath

Says a reader:

I don't think sociopathy is inherently some kind of evil thing upon humanity. They are useful people for tasks that most can't do. But I don't think you fit the bill of sociopathy. You fit the bill for a type of antisocial personality disorder that a normal person can obtain, but with the disorder can perform the tasks of a sociopath, but I don't think you're a sociopath.

Well, perhaps you are if you take sociopath as learned and psychopath as inherent... but if you don't do such a thing like modern diagnosis does, and you simple let all the learned APDs take their form in the various other names, you definitely are not a sociopath. 

I think you're just among one of the more common "express pathological capable", and you're much more similar to an empath than you care to admit (because empathic personality is achievable by every person not sociopathic). Sociopathy is born, or irreversibly instilled by damage or early 'wiring'. 


A sociopath can not actually love, because love means to value the person and stay by them even though you found something you think might be a better time. Sociopaths don't do such a thing. You seem to be able to do such a thing. I think you just have one of those very intense APDs that isn't sociopathy that is just self indulging and maintaining child-like behavior.

I don't mean any offense, it's just what I'm noticing compared to what I've researched.

M.E.: No offense taken. If sociopaths can't love at all, then I must not be a sociopath because I feel like I feel love.

Reader:

So the brain varies in many different ways and people just fall along it, of course you know this based on what I've read. The way your describe stuff puts you very analytical. I think that's just the way a person should strive to be. I feel like everyone has it in them to want to hate, cause harm, dislike, "see what if". 

Also, there's this way of thinking that basically anyone can accomplish, where one puts oneself as an observer of life like a show to watch, or one actively participates. I feel like a lot of people just observe, do "what if" and really see no one as important.

Once one immerses one's self into life as something that is important to survival, and so on, and realizes cooperation with a healthy sense of caution is important, it is all better, in my opinion. What with the possibility of life spans somehow miraculouly growing exponentially if some kind of technological singularity breaks lose, however unlikely it is to happen. I'm just saying, it's the way most people just act without realizing why they act that way. I really had to analyze this myself and understand how being good is important.

M.E.: I think I understand a little what you're saying. You're saying that this mindset, that you also share or admire, is normal (or at least natural) and probably better (or more logical?) then the other way of being. But the fact that there is another way of being that most people are that leads to completely different ways of relating to the world and others is sort of what I mean. I understand that people can be sociopathic without being sociopaths. I also believe the current trend in conceptualizing sociopathy is to see it as a spectrum, with people expressing certain traits more than others but all sharing the same basic thought processes. And I also understand sociopathy to be quite common, at least 1% and as much as 4% of the population. So I'm not really one of these people that think that sociopathy is a rare thing and that there is a bright line separating sociopath from normal (and particularly not sociopathic from normal). And yes, of course thinking sociopathically has advantages (for both the individual and society) -- otherwise it wouldn't have arisen as an evolutionary adaptive trait shared by a significant portion of the population.

Reader:

I also just want to point out that the more I try to figure out the reason people do things different, the more they're just similar but raised different. The reason someone gives me for a particularly striking social deviation has always been because this is my experience (or come to find lack of an experience that is common). So of everyone is so different in some analytical way, most people seem to be powerful computers that are simply capable of preferring anything, really.

And I just read one of your latest articles about caring. Tying into what I said last time, and remembering how most people describe children as sociopaths of the worst kind. I really believe people's default level of caring originates from upbringing. Its usually useful. Work together, get more done. Don't feel passive aggressive or be hurtful just for fun, feel more relaxed and ready for tasks. But one should take the power in themselves to not only re-evaluate if they should care less, because some of it is burdensome and pointless... Because what if there are other things to care about?

Intellectually, one may not care about strangers, but if one can train oneself to identifying within strangers the altruistic good behavior (that remains cautious, mind you) then one can safely indulge themselves in on that behavior, only ever going too far to help strangers when identifying such demeanor.

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Camus on Candyland

I thought this was an interesting sort of follow up to yesterday's post, from Existential Comics (with the bigger, more readable version here):




Monday, December 15, 2014

Survival of the fittest

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. 
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