December 22, 2012

• Yes, there are bad people.

  JDN 2456283 EDT 17:23.

   

  It’s taken me some time to realize this, for a few reasons. My high level of empathy makes me want to see the good in everyone, my liberal sensibilities make me look first to social structures and systems of policy to explain behavior, and my atheism makes me dubious of beings of pure evil like demons or Satan.

  Yet, there are bad people, people who are, innately, probably genetically, wired differently from other human beings. They are almost not human beings, in fact; they lack the traits that made human civilization possible. They are in some sense my opposite: Where I have very high empathy, they have virtually none. Where I struggle with self-confidence, they are convinced of their own superiority. Where I feel guilty for saying the white lies that social norms expect, they deceive and manipulate without hesitation. We call them psychopaths.

  Not all the bad things in the world are the result of psychopaths: There are crimes of passion, honest mistakes, bad policies, and false beliefs, all of which do plenty of damage. Yet, the really terrible things, the truly monstrous evils, are almost always committed by psychopaths. Organized crime, corruption, serial murder, rape, tyranny, genocide–psychopaths, almost without exception. Indeed, while religion makes good people do bad things, religions are almost always founded by psychopaths. This should be obvious in the case of L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith; but I would hazard a guess for Muhammad and Moses as well. The only one I hesitate about is Jesus, who clearly showed empathy; he seems more like he had a very severe case of psychotic bipolar disorder: Liar, Lunatic, Lord. Then again, Christianity didn’t really take off until Constantine, who was definitely a psychopath. Increasingly, we are finding that the instability of our financial system can be traced in large part to a small number of psychopaths manipulating the system in their favor at our expense. World War 2, the worst conflict in human history, can basically be traced to two psychopaths, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

  In fact, psychopaths are all around us; they comprise about 1% of the population, which means that you probably know a few, and there are 3 million in the US alone. A lot of people, even liberals, were saying that it’s no big deal that Mitt Romney used to bully other children and put a dog on the roof of his car; but it is a big deal: Juvenile behavior problems and cruelty to animals are classic signs of psychopathy. Do you want a psychopath in charge of the American government (and military, and nuclear arsenal)? Because Mitt Romney fits most of the criteria for a high-functioning white-collar psychopath. So does Dick Cheney, and he almost single-handedly got us into the Iraq war, which killed almost a million people; as far as I can tell he did so primarily to raise the stock price of Halliburton (which he of course owns many shares of).

  Lest you think I just tar people I don’t like with the charge of psychopathy, I am fairly certain that George W. Bush is not a psychopath; he doesn’t fit most of the criteria. Nixon probably was, but Reagan probably wasn’t. I don’t like the policies Bush and Reagan enacted, but I think they genuinely believing they were making America better. They weren’t simply acting in their own narrow self-interest the way psychopaths would. Actually, staunch opposition to abortion and gay marriage, while awful in its own way, is very unlikely for a psychopath, because these issues require emotional reactions and consideration of issues beyond oneself. Notice how Dick Cheney flip-flopped on gay marriage when he found out his daughter is a lesbian; this might seem like a sign of compassion, but it makes just as much sense as a strategic decision on an issue he never really cared about. Someone who feels the sense of disgust and repugnance that makes them want to restrict homosexuality has a kind of emotional repertoire that psychopaths don’t. (On the other hand, it’s possible to be disgusted by something and still not think it’s the government’s business: This is how I feel about coprophagia, for example.)

  When we talk about “mental illness” as a cause of gun massacres, we really should be talking about psychopathy. It is not people with bipolar disorder or autism who commit violent rampages. Maybe there are some people with schizophrenia so severe that their paranoid delusions cause them to become violent (as you might too, if you believed you were surrounded by alien invaders or agents of a tyrannical government), but plenty of people with schizophrenia function normally with therapy and medication.

  No, it is psychopaths that we don’t know what to do with. We know that they commit a disproportionate quantity of violent crime, and we are finding that they are also responsible for a great deal of white-collar crime as well; but we know no treatment for their condition, and often the best we can do is lock them away and never let them out.

  Most people are empaths, i.e. we feel empathy and aren’t psychopaths. But this means that most people, being empaths, don’t really understand how psychopaths work. They say things like, “If it’s their broken amygdalas, doesn’t that mean it’s not their fault?” No, you don’t understand. Remember the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: We are our brains. Of course there’s something in their brains that is different–if there weren’t, they wouldn’t act different. If we could actually alter their brains to make them into empaths, by all means, do so; I’ve always felt that A Clockwork Orange is a better solution than either allowing rape and murder or locking people away for their whole lives. But right now, we can’t; we’re stuck with them being broken, dangerous… evil. That amygdala anomaly is the physical manifestation of evil, which of course must exist, because evil exists and the world is made of physical stuff. You should feel hardly more pity for the psychopath than he would feel for you–which is to say, none at all. If it helps you to think of him as a demon, go ahead; for he is as close as one can come in the real world.

  • 6:46 pm
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