Kevin Dutton Article Take Two

Part One...

All right, this article is actually on Dutton’s site, so hopefully it is a real article where we can look at his thoughts and research regarding psychopathy. He is a really great resource when it comes to looking at psychopathy as more than, “evil supervillain”, but in this case he is speaking with Robert Hare, and I think you all know how I consider that particular individual. So, we’ll see how it goes. I have the sense that Hare is going to say a bunch of nonsense, though, so be prepared for that. Just a heads-up, there is something with the font of Dutton’s site that makes it impossible to paste as plain text, so it is going to look different, and it also won’t allow for block quoting, so the weird text will stand in place of that.

Over a 28-year-old single-malt scotch at the Scientific Study of Psychopathy’s biennial bash in Montreal in 2011, I asked Bob Hare, “When you look around you at modern-day society, do you think, in general, that we’re becoming more psychopathic?”

Oh, goody… I can’t wait for his response. Also, apparently only part of it disallows for the paste as plain text, and block quoting thing, so sorry about the weird formatting.

The eminent criminal psychologist and creator of the widely used Psychopathy Checklist paused before answering. “I think, in general, yes, society is becoming more psychopathic,” he said. “I mean, there’s stuff going on nowadays that we wouldn’t have seen 20, even 10 years ago. Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet. Rent-a-friend sites are getting more popular on the Web, because folks are either too busy or too techy to make real ones. … The recent hike in female criminality is particularly revealing. And don’t even get me started on Wall Street.”

*Head on desk*

Here we go. He didn’t even wait for like a second before they decided to go ahead with the nonsense. All right, Dr. Hare, have you ever, even once in your life, head within your hand, a history book? Seen a movie, perhaps? Do you know what this is?

That is a pear of anguish. This was a traditional form of sanctioned torture for a variety of crimes. It is inserted into orifices, and then expanded, tearing said orifice asunder. That is one, of so, so many torture devices that were standard practice in the world. There are still plenty more in use right this moment.

Has it occurred to Dr. Hare that we were living in an unprecedented time of kindness toward our fellow man, unlike anything we have seen in all of human history. A brief diminishment of human darkness, only to have it come back to a slight degree, is not society becoming, “more psychopathic”. The fact that this man says that with a straight face makes me really question the quality of his education and understanding of human nature. I think psychology was not a calling for him, which explains why he forced it to fit his worldview, instead of learning about humans and their preference for high order infliction of damage to one another, and then trying to find anomalies within that understanding.

Kids are becoming anesthetized to normal sexual behavior by early exposure to pornography on the Internet.

Yes, I agree with that, and it changed their synaptic wiring in the brain. For more information, please see here:

He’s got a point. In Japan in 2011, a 17- year-old boy parted with one of his own kidneys so he could go out and buy an iPad. In China, following an incident in which a 2-year-old baby was left stranded in the middle of a marketplace and run over, not once but twice, as passersby went casually about their business, an appalled electorate has petitioned the government to pass a good-Samaritan law to prevent such a thing from happening again.

Does he, though? That isn’t psychopathic in nature at all. That is a normal human brain that isn’t fully developed and cannot predict the consequences of their actions, in terms of the kid parting with their kidney. As for the child in China, there is apparently a total lack of understanding of how things work in China. If you help someone, you can be sued. They just have to claim that you injured them, and they will claim it, and you will be on the hook for massive amounts of damages. There is no good Samaritan law there. It is in your interest in that society to not help. The two-year-old getting run over is one of a ton of examples of such things. It isn’t that the people are just coldly saying, f*ck that kid. It is a social law to not intervene, lest you be on the hook, and potentially devastate your family financially.

Again, not psychopathic, just human nature.

And the new millennium has seemingly ushered in a wave of corporate criminality like no other. Investment scams, conflicts of interest, lapses of judgment, and those evergreen entrepreneurial party tricks of good old fraud and embezzlement are now utterly unprecedented in magnitude. Who’s to blame? In an issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, Clive R. Boddy, a former professor at the Nottingham Business School, contends that it’s psychopaths, pure and simple, who are at the root of all the trouble.

Okay, and? Is the argument here that this has anything to do with anything other than human nature? Do I need to start listing how the world worked a couple of centuries ago? Trust me, people lying in order to bankrupt a few elderly marks is nothing compared to the radium girls, or the lobotomy craze, and that is pretty modern. I could spend an hour listing things that have changed for the better when it comes to people’s abilities to defend themselves legally from scammers, but they have always been there. What’s amusing to me is the lack of comprehension that in the past, these scammers, and at times outright serial killers (specifically I am thinking about the Benders here) that would lure people in, kill them, and no one was the wiser due to their isolation. Even when they were found out, they weren’t caught. They disappeared into the ether.

Can we please dispense with this notion that humans are inherently good? They aren’t. Most of what gets laid at the feel of psychopaths is just human nature on primary display in all the colors of deception and greed. Enclaves of humans can be good, but there has to be significant social conditioning and potential loss of standing in the group to reinforce this behavior as the norm.

The law itself has gotten in on the act. At the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping trial, in Salt Lake City, the attorney representing Brian David Mitchell—the homeless street preacher and self-proclaimed prophet who abducted, raped, and kept the 14-year-old Elizabeth captive for nine months (according to Smart’s testimony, he raped her pretty much every day over that period)—urged the sentencing judge to go easy on his client, on the grounds that “Ms. Smart overcame it. Survived it. Triumphed over it.” When the lawyers start whipping up that kind of tune, the dance could wind up anywhere.

Sooo…. a defense attorney doing his literal job is a sign of psychopathy? Smart’s kidnapper is a piece of sh*t. Put him under the prison with a bunch of very hangry sadistic wolves as far as I care, but come on… the lawyer is supposed to argue diminished capacity. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be doing what he is getting paid for. What kind of argument is this?

Of course, it’s not just the lawyers. In a recent study by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, in London, 120 convicted street robbers were asked why they did it. The answers were revealing. Kicks. Spur-ofthe-moment impulses. Status. And financial gain. In that order.

Oh, Dr. Dutton, this has nothing to do with psychopathy, this has to do with a total lack of shame in society now. People behave better when shame is a real consequence. This social situation is actually where you might see psychopathy. Psychopaths don’t care about shame, at all. So, when society is utilizing shame, and you have someone that operates outside that construct, you might be dealing with a psychopath. However, when society no longer shames people’s behaviors that are damaging to society as a whole, then people will indulge their darkest impulses. This isn’t psychopathy, or a more psychopathic society. This is neurotypicals entertaining the aspects of themselves that they would otherwise keep hidden. That’s just neurotypicals without restraints.

Psychopaths are not neurotypicals without restraints. We lack too many emotions that are inherently wired in neurotypicals for that to be an apt comparison.

Exactly the kind of casual, callous behavior patterns one often sees in psychopaths.

Sigh. Nope. I expected better of you, Dr. Dutton. Neurotypicals and psychopaths aren’t comparable. We are too different to try and draw these types of comparisons. When a psychopath behaves in a negative way, it is to accomplish something. When a neurotypical does so, it is almost always due to an emotional reason that is driving that behavior.

In fact, in a survey that has so far tested 14,000 volunteers, Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels have been in steady decline over the past three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979. A particularly pronounced slump has been observed over the past 10 years.

Go figure. When you remove human interaction on a regular basis as the norm, people become the center of the universe in their minds. That would be why you see so much, “main character syndrome”. It’s due to humans not having the tribal living situation that they have evolved to exist within. It’s really not a surprise that they are more or less spiraling. There is no empathy for what cannot be understood, but they, as a society of neurotypicals, are not becoming more psychopathic. In fact, they are becoming more anxious and depressed as their connection to one another falters. That is the opposite of psychopathy. We like being alone. It changes nothing for us.

“College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago,” Konrath reports. More worrisome still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students’ self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. “Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called ‘Generation Me,’ ” Konrath continues, “as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history.”

Well, when you are raised more by a screen than you are by your parents, you really can’t be surprised. Self reported narcissism isn’t surprising, either. Again, they have become the center of their own world, and there isn’t a larger social body to tell them to knock it off, that they are one of many. Again, not psychopathic in nature.

Why is this happening?

Precisely why this downturn in social values has come about is not entirely clear. A complex concatenation of environment, role models, and education is, as usual, under suspicion. But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie in a study conducted by Jeffrey Zacks and his team at the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory, at Washington University in St. Louis. With the aid of FMRI, Zacks and his co-authors peered deep inside the brains of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters’ locations (e.g., “went out of the house into the street”) were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects that a character interacted with (e.g., “picked up a pencil”) produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important, however, changes in a character’s goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action.

…Why are there so many words in that paragraph when the answer is simple. Social disconnection and social media. They are living in a world that is totally unobtainable due to filters and lies. They don’t have the social relationships that they would have had prior to social media’s existence, and they are searching for an identity in a storm of confusion. It’s really not difficult to see why young people are struggling emotionally. That doesn’t even add on to the financial hell that they are finding themselves in with insane student debt for worthless degrees, and a total lack of ability to buy a house and start a family.

Don’t even get me started on student loan interest rates. Straight up predatory.

They are looking at the results of the society, but not addressing the causes. It’s very disconnected.

Holy crap, I just scrolled this article. It’s freaking long, this is not getting done in one post, unless I find it totally ridiculous, and I give up on it. I hope that won’t be the case with Dutton, but you never know.

Imagining, it would seem, really does make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to one of the researchers, Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses. Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic.

Again, super wordy to say, I dunno. Listen, the world has changed and how young people are being raised has drastically changed. When a parent wants peace and quiet, they put their kids in front of a screen. That changes how the brain develops, and it changes how a person thinks. They are raised in a virtual world that tells them things that simply are not true. It messes people up.

Which is worrisome, to say the least, given the current slump in reading habits. According to a 2011 survey conducted by the British charity the National Literacy Trust, one in three children between the ages of 11 and 16 do not own a book, compared with one in 10 in 2005. That equates, in today’s England, to a total of around four million. Almost a fifth of the 18,000 children polled said they had never received a book as a present. And 12 percent said they had never been to a bookshop.

People read all the time, but they don’t see a point to go to a bookshop, it’s all in their phone. Almost every book you can imagine is online. Why does it seem like these conclusions are being made while ignoring the real world in which these aspects exist? It’s really weird. We can’t understand why people are losing empathy and don’t go to bookshops, so we will assume that they don’t read (they do), and that they should still be formulating themselves as adults as though social media is not a thing that most people spend the majority of their days in.

But if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it’s not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as “an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses.”

Yeah, but it’s not. It’s becoming ill compared to how it used to be, but in no way does it resemble psychopathy, unless you remove crucial aspects that are creating society as a whole as it is now. Psychopaths don’t yearn for lives they see online. We don’t compare ourselves to others. We are immune to Instagram face, and don’t seek to stand out by blending into the social media creation of normality. We aren’t going to feel anxious or depressed for not measuring up to what is the standard now. Society is becoming more fractured, but certainly not more psychopathic.

All right, this article goes into a lot of writing about Andy McNab, and becomes a long prose. This is where I will break for the next post to go into that part. I don’t know what Andy McNab is going to have in common with the previous aspect of this article, but we shall see, I suppose.

Until next time.