Hidden suffering of the psychopath...a walking contradiction,anyways someone needs to update their knowledge.Or they are doing it out of fame and some money?
Its "sad" to see that a science studing the humqn mind comes to this.Not everyone is the same,but if i was a head doc i would try to cure people,research comes to mind....not the the bloody money.
"Also, there is no trust at all, for anyone, ever, so this notion of, “loving and trusting the rest of the world” is asinine on its face. It has no place in an article about psychopathy."
Not even for your friend or partner to some degree? Or is it more that you treat them like people you trust in absence of the emotional feeling as a logical result of concluding they've done enough to earn that treatment?
"Also, most of us will never know that they are psychopathic, because people like you write trash like this."
I imagine that they know that they are undeniably different to many in the way that they don't emotionally connect to others though and likely question it!
Trust for me is cognitive. There is no emotional trust, which is created through oxytocin. For me, trust is something that I grant after years of consistency, and even then, it is not something that I feel, but rather something that I am giving them the assumption that their consistent behavior will continue.
I will be frank, I don't understand that much about the trust mechanism in neurotypicals. It wasn't until the last few years that I learned that trust for them is an emotion, not a choice. I was always baffled when I saw people put trust into someone I could clearly see was not worthy of it, and finding out the oxytocin link answered why that was. It was an automated process, and it could be tripped by simply meeting whatever that person's criteria was for trust. Seems like a system flaw.
I agree, and it is also completely strange to me that they are so defensive about that feeling when they have been burned in the past. It makes no sense to me. If someone is telling you that another person is suspect, why is it so emotionally necessary to believe that they are correct about their feeling.
To be honest I'm not too sure about this idea that trust is an emotion in its own right for neurotypicals - the reason I say that is that true emotions like happiness, sadness, love, fear, anger etc are all associated with specific physical sensations in the body, which is how you know you're feeling that emotion - like prickling behind the eyes and a lump in the throat with sadness, a feeling of lightness in the chest and warmth/fuzziness with happiness, and things like heart racing, coldness, feeling sick, sweating, for fear. But I wouldn't say that trust has any particular physical sensations associated with it for NTs, so I don't think I'd categorize it as a true emotion in itself.
But I do agree that the assessment of whether to trust someone has an emotional element to it for NTs that would likely be missing for psychopaths. Eg when making the decision to trust someone or not, I think NTs are taking things into account other than just a purely rational assessment of past behaviour, as a psychopath would be. Rational assessment of past behavior is part of it for NTs too, but there is something else going on relating to emotions, which I think probably wouldn't be accessible to a psychopath.
For example, when my kids were babies I sometimes found myself in a public place, like a cafe, with them asleep in the carseat, really needing the bathroom, but knowing there was no room in there to take them with me, and not wanting to disturb their sleep either. And on a few occasions, in that scenario, I left them in the care of a complete stranger for a few minutes. From a psychopath's point of view that probably seems like a very strange thing to do, to trust a complete stranger with the most precious things in the world to you. I couldn't possibly have any significant or reliable amount of knowledge of the person's past behaviour in that scenario... but I still did it, and I'm not a reckless person, I'm generally quite a cautious person overall. In every case it was always a woman, always had kids with her, always dressed in a certain way, with a certain kindness around the eyes, very quick to smile and laugh. I definitely wasn't just leaving them with any random person!
I think what's going on in situations like that is that NTs are able to pick up on subtle clues as to a person's internal emotional world, within a matter of seconds, which help us to assess the type of person they are, without really having any evidence of past behavior. Because emotions have such a huge impact on NTs, positive and negative, there is massive variation between people in terms of their internal emotional landscape, depending on how they were treated in childhood - how they feel about themselves, other people, the world in general. People can be very fearful, or extremely quick to anger, and very emotionally volatile as a result. They may have been abused and have a strong impulse to lash out at others in stressful situations. Or they may be very emotionally stable, with a a positive view of themselves and the world, and a strong self of self, and have good emotional control and much more constructive ways of dealing with difficult situations. All of these things affect what type of person they are, and how they're likely to treat others, or react to situations, and people give off all sorts of clues as to which of those general categories they fall into, without even realizing it. The way someone expresses themself through how they dress, the way they talk, what they're talking about, the way they carry themselves, their facial expressions, the other people they're with, all give clues as to their internal emotional world, which other NTs can pick up on. Alot of people would argue that with people over a certain age you can even see someone's general emotional state of mind over their lifetime etched on their face - the location of lines and wrinkles and the set of the mouth can give you an idea of whether the person has experienced mainly positive emotions over the course of their life, or mainly negative ones.
I'm guessing that it must be much easier for an NT to pick up on these subtle clues about someone's internal emotional world, because we experience the same emotions ourselves - and much harder for a psychopath to decipher those clues, because your personal experience of the emotions is so limited (but maybe not non-existent, as I know you do experienced some muted emotions).
So while I'm not sure that trust is actually an emotion in its own right, I do think you're right that the process of deciding whether to trust someone has an emotional element to it for NTs which would be missing or much more muted for psychopaths - hence your much heavier reliance on concrete and consistent evidence of past behaviour.
It may be true that some neurotypicals can pick up on things from others, I find that many times, they trust people that they have no business trusting.
“Uhh… you seem to have us confused with narcissistic personality disorder.” That point explains his obvious confusion. Every trait he attributes to psychopathy fits into the category of NPD.
Do you ever try to contact these confused people and set them straight?
No. Robert Hare, as an example of this sort of thinking, sued his own colleagues when they put out an article that criticized the PCL-R. I have no interest in dealing with that sort of legal issue because I caused a little ego upset.
I admit I skimmed this, because I was bored, but it seems like he was conflating psychopathy, with things like CPTSD, BPD, sociopathy or the other trauma based disorders that impact impulse control, empathy, and interpersonal relationships.
I don't think that he would find that there is a difference between all of those things. He sort of seems the type to point and scream, "psychopath" about all of them, so long as they were also a criminal.
I will wait with baited breath...actually not, because I don't care all that much. I will still probably read it, because I am a creature of habit. Ah, well. What I definitely am interested in learning more about is the psychopathic take on the unexplained. You mentioned it in a recent interview, and I realized we don't usually get an emotionally void and logical take on all of it.
There's usually a ton of emotional noise and attachment to specific outcomes or belief systems that comes with neurotypical interpretations and research. Is that something you would ever cover more in depth? I think it would be an interesting perspective to learn more about.
Have I not written about that before? I thought I had. I looked through my history, and can't find it. How strange. I will rectify that if I don't find a post I already wrote about it.
I haven't seen one, and it definitely would have caught my attention. That said, I didn’t closely follow your blog for a few years so I might have missed it.
I think this is another reason why psychopathy so often gets conflated with other conditions and disorders (apart from the historical stuff, PCL-R stuff and only studying psychopaths in prison stuff, which definitely hasn't helped) - because almost all mental health or psychological conditions in humans are trauma based, I think most people just have a really hard time imagining why psychopathy would be any different, especially since it (superficially) shares some symptoms or traits with other conditions that are very obviously trauma responses. I don't think the average neurotypical has any reason to even suspect that it's possible for a human brain to function as differently from the norm as a psychopath's does, or that it can just be a natural state from birth, rather than a trauma response - so they see traits like lack of empathy, lack of guilt etc, and assume that they must be the result of emotional damage in childhood, and therefore not so different from other conditions with similar traits.
That's why your writing is so important Athena, because I don't think it's possible to read more than 5 or 10 of your posts, especially the stories from everyday life and childhood, and not understand that psychopathy is very very different. Some of the signs of psychopathy are so unusual and absolute (never falling in love, no emotions attached to memories, zero fear etc), and so unrelated to anything that would be likely to result from trauma, that it's almost impossible not to conclude that it's a completely different class of condition than all the others. Even without brain scans & research etc, the absoluteness of the symptoms alone strongly suggests that something is very fundamentally different about a psychopath's brain, beyond what could be explained by any degree of trauma.
The world is just not quite getting it just yet, but one day it will.
Ha! Well so far she seems to be making more headway in dispelling the myths than the other 8 billion people on this planet combined, so maybe she will be famous one day, who knows! More famous than Hare if there's any justice in the world lol :o)
That doctor is very annoying. His idea of a psychopath is more like a psychological Chimera. I am still not sure why so many people care so much about psychopathy. Weirdly, this reminds me of some people’s fascination with Jews and all the strange conflicting things they attribute to us.
It is similar, I agree. I had a conversation with someone over on Quora, who gave me a history lesson on the history of antisemitism, not defending it, just giving me the background. Even learning the history of it, I do not understand how people think that it's remotely logical. There is a very similar refusal to hear logical arguments when it comes to antisemitism, and psychopathy. It vexes me.
I was explaining what I call Wolf Time to a friend. You’re driving in fog and the limits of your fog light is 15 minutes ahead and the rear view is likely less. That’s Wolf Time and that’s my world.
"...do you think that a psychopath can walk into a company out of the blue, and that company just immediately ushers them into the corner office, slapping down the CEO nameplate?"
I think it's happened a few times. There was that guy who lied about all of his experience and became an effective CEO for at least a year until a completely unrelated document check revealed the lie. There was an argument to keep him on because he was effective but HR had its way and he was out, but he can put former CEO on the resume now.
There's that one doctor who just lied and said he was a surgeon and he'd just cram session the specific operation he had to do the night before. He was also incredibly good at his job because the psychopath nerves of steel never-choke were more important to being a surgeon than any particular knowledge. In fact, when I reviewed the surgeon training in general, most of it is to get a person to the level of emotional detachment psychopaths have as a default.
"In the ultimate example of “fake it til you make it,” Ferdinand Demara boarded the HMCS Cayuga, a Canadian Navy destroyer during the Korean War. He was impersonating a doctor, which was fine until the ship started taking on more serious casualties and Demara was left as the ship’s only “surgeon”.
This is the point where most people would throw up their hands and announce the game was up, but Demara wasn’t ultimately labeled “the Great Imposter” for nothing. He had a photographic memory and a very high IQ.
So the new doctor went into his quarters for a few minutes with a medical textbook, came back out and then operated the 16 badly injured troops — including one who required major chest surgery — and saved them all."
I think you could actually make a good case for the idea that psychopathy isn't a 'disorder' at all, it's just an alternative evolutionary path that humanity took a very very long time ago. So while most of us were evolving to have pro-social emotions because they help us to manage relationships with others and therefore to live in groups, with all the protections and survival advantages that affords - a small subset of humans evolved in a different direction, based on a genetic mutation which switches those pro-social emotions off.
Because while switching off oxytocin has it's disadvantages from a survival point of view, for example the lack of fear causing psychopaths to take risks with their own safety, it also undoubtedly has huge advantages too, especially the calmness and clear thinking in stressful situations. I know who I would rather have by my side in a crisis! To me it's not hard to see why a genetic mutation like that might survive to the present day in a small percentage of humans, rather than dying out.
In all honestly I think psychopathy is only seen as a disorder because it exists in a 99% neurotypical world, where mainly neurotypicals make the rules and define terms. So psychopathy is viewed as a disorder because it's so obviously a departure from the norm, and people focus on the ways that it tends to be more problematic than being neurotypical, rather than the ways it's less problematic.
But I think that objectively speaking you'd have to admit that both psychopathic and neurotypical ways of experiencing the world have both advantages and disadvantages, and when you consider the awful things emotions drive people to do sometimes, you could argue that the neurotypical way of being is just as pathological from the psychopathic perspective, as the psychopathic way of being is from the neurotypical perspective.
Study of prison population for ANY insight, just plain silly as you make clear: Violent crimes and circumstances have no statue of limitations. Those revealing their violent crimes are those with nothing left to lose or seek attention or status, especially protecting their own self in prison life.
Apparently it wasn't always like this: The three main characters in the Bible, Moses, David, Paul, were all murderers.
The crimes didn't ruin the story, they ARE the story, and doesn't really seem that big a deal.
Even the first dust up, Cain kills Able. He got some minor punishment (by GOD himself if I read it right). He still had his freedom and could tell his story to anyone interested.
As said in the South, "Lord have mercy on dumb-asses Athena Walker calls out. Bless their pea pickin' hearts.
Amen."
Ha!
Hidden suffering of the psychopath...a walking contradiction,anyways someone needs to update their knowledge.Or they are doing it out of fame and some money?
My guess is that it's the latter
Its "sad" to see that a science studing the humqn mind comes to this.Not everyone is the same,but if i was a head doc i would try to cure people,research comes to mind....not the the bloody money.
It's about their ego as well, and that can be a hard trait to tame for some people.
I would think it would only boost their ego if the information was actually valid.
No, just information that makes them stand out, and lasts until after they die. Or, at least, that's my guess
Thanks for the article share Athena.
"Also, there is no trust at all, for anyone, ever, so this notion of, “loving and trusting the rest of the world” is asinine on its face. It has no place in an article about psychopathy."
Not even for your friend or partner to some degree? Or is it more that you treat them like people you trust in absence of the emotional feeling as a logical result of concluding they've done enough to earn that treatment?
"Also, most of us will never know that they are psychopathic, because people like you write trash like this."
I imagine that they know that they are undeniably different to many in the way that they don't emotionally connect to others though and likely question it!
Trust for me is cognitive. There is no emotional trust, which is created through oxytocin. For me, trust is something that I grant after years of consistency, and even then, it is not something that I feel, but rather something that I am giving them the assumption that their consistent behavior will continue.
Makes much logical sense to me.
hey Emma. Athena.
NTs are bound by oxytocin to emotional trust? And they depend on this emotional feeling to know who to trust?
Someone so bound, to me, will continue to trust me, right up to the point where I move along from that relationship?
In theory, do I have this about right?
I will be frank, I don't understand that much about the trust mechanism in neurotypicals. It wasn't until the last few years that I learned that trust for them is an emotion, not a choice. I was always baffled when I saw people put trust into someone I could clearly see was not worthy of it, and finding out the oxytocin link answered why that was. It was an automated process, and it could be tripped by simply meeting whatever that person's criteria was for trust. Seems like a system flaw.
LOL: "System flaw" is right!! TY for kind and provocative reply.
As far as I can tell: I do not experience trust as an emotion.
Automated Process. That is baffling. I see the value of a kid relating to his mother in Automated Trust. But to stay that way? As an adult?
Your experiences, seeing others trust themselves to those unworthy, seem a rich source of future material: Like seeing a bunny fall into a buzz saw.
What do they risk? Money, Property, Love, Secrets? When burned, don't they retaliate?
Baffling indeed.
I agree, and it is also completely strange to me that they are so defensive about that feeling when they have been burned in the past. It makes no sense to me. If someone is telling you that another person is suspect, why is it so emotionally necessary to believe that they are correct about their feeling.
To be honest I'm not too sure about this idea that trust is an emotion in its own right for neurotypicals - the reason I say that is that true emotions like happiness, sadness, love, fear, anger etc are all associated with specific physical sensations in the body, which is how you know you're feeling that emotion - like prickling behind the eyes and a lump in the throat with sadness, a feeling of lightness in the chest and warmth/fuzziness with happiness, and things like heart racing, coldness, feeling sick, sweating, for fear. But I wouldn't say that trust has any particular physical sensations associated with it for NTs, so I don't think I'd categorize it as a true emotion in itself.
But I do agree that the assessment of whether to trust someone has an emotional element to it for NTs that would likely be missing for psychopaths. Eg when making the decision to trust someone or not, I think NTs are taking things into account other than just a purely rational assessment of past behaviour, as a psychopath would be. Rational assessment of past behavior is part of it for NTs too, but there is something else going on relating to emotions, which I think probably wouldn't be accessible to a psychopath.
For example, when my kids were babies I sometimes found myself in a public place, like a cafe, with them asleep in the carseat, really needing the bathroom, but knowing there was no room in there to take them with me, and not wanting to disturb their sleep either. And on a few occasions, in that scenario, I left them in the care of a complete stranger for a few minutes. From a psychopath's point of view that probably seems like a very strange thing to do, to trust a complete stranger with the most precious things in the world to you. I couldn't possibly have any significant or reliable amount of knowledge of the person's past behaviour in that scenario... but I still did it, and I'm not a reckless person, I'm generally quite a cautious person overall. In every case it was always a woman, always had kids with her, always dressed in a certain way, with a certain kindness around the eyes, very quick to smile and laugh. I definitely wasn't just leaving them with any random person!
I think what's going on in situations like that is that NTs are able to pick up on subtle clues as to a person's internal emotional world, within a matter of seconds, which help us to assess the type of person they are, without really having any evidence of past behavior. Because emotions have such a huge impact on NTs, positive and negative, there is massive variation between people in terms of their internal emotional landscape, depending on how they were treated in childhood - how they feel about themselves, other people, the world in general. People can be very fearful, or extremely quick to anger, and very emotionally volatile as a result. They may have been abused and have a strong impulse to lash out at others in stressful situations. Or they may be very emotionally stable, with a a positive view of themselves and the world, and a strong self of self, and have good emotional control and much more constructive ways of dealing with difficult situations. All of these things affect what type of person they are, and how they're likely to treat others, or react to situations, and people give off all sorts of clues as to which of those general categories they fall into, without even realizing it. The way someone expresses themself through how they dress, the way they talk, what they're talking about, the way they carry themselves, their facial expressions, the other people they're with, all give clues as to their internal emotional world, which other NTs can pick up on. Alot of people would argue that with people over a certain age you can even see someone's general emotional state of mind over their lifetime etched on their face - the location of lines and wrinkles and the set of the mouth can give you an idea of whether the person has experienced mainly positive emotions over the course of their life, or mainly negative ones.
I'm guessing that it must be much easier for an NT to pick up on these subtle clues about someone's internal emotional world, because we experience the same emotions ourselves - and much harder for a psychopath to decipher those clues, because your personal experience of the emotions is so limited (but maybe not non-existent, as I know you do experienced some muted emotions).
So while I'm not sure that trust is actually an emotion in its own right, I do think you're right that the process of deciding whether to trust someone has an emotional element to it for NTs which would be missing or much more muted for psychopaths - hence your much heavier reliance on concrete and consistent evidence of past behaviour.
It may be true that some neurotypicals can pick up on things from others, I find that many times, they trust people that they have no business trusting.
“Uhh… you seem to have us confused with narcissistic personality disorder.” That point explains his obvious confusion. Every trait he attributes to psychopathy fits into the category of NPD.
Do you ever try to contact these confused people and set them straight?
No. Robert Hare, as an example of this sort of thinking, sued his own colleagues when they put out an article that criticized the PCL-R. I have no interest in dealing with that sort of legal issue because I caused a little ego upset.
That makes sense.
I admit I skimmed this, because I was bored, but it seems like he was conflating psychopathy, with things like CPTSD, BPD, sociopathy or the other trauma based disorders that impact impulse control, empathy, and interpersonal relationships.
I don't think that he would find that there is a difference between all of those things. He sort of seems the type to point and scream, "psychopath" about all of them, so long as they were also a criminal.
Actually, he does... wait until next week.
I will wait with baited breath...actually not, because I don't care all that much. I will still probably read it, because I am a creature of habit. Ah, well. What I definitely am interested in learning more about is the psychopathic take on the unexplained. You mentioned it in a recent interview, and I realized we don't usually get an emotionally void and logical take on all of it.
There's usually a ton of emotional noise and attachment to specific outcomes or belief systems that comes with neurotypical interpretations and research. Is that something you would ever cover more in depth? I think it would be an interesting perspective to learn more about.
Have I not written about that before? I thought I had. I looked through my history, and can't find it. How strange. I will rectify that if I don't find a post I already wrote about it.
I haven't seen one, and it definitely would have caught my attention. That said, I didn’t closely follow your blog for a few years so I might have missed it.
I will look again. If I don't find it, I will write one, regardless of it being a repeat post
I think this is another reason why psychopathy so often gets conflated with other conditions and disorders (apart from the historical stuff, PCL-R stuff and only studying psychopaths in prison stuff, which definitely hasn't helped) - because almost all mental health or psychological conditions in humans are trauma based, I think most people just have a really hard time imagining why psychopathy would be any different, especially since it (superficially) shares some symptoms or traits with other conditions that are very obviously trauma responses. I don't think the average neurotypical has any reason to even suspect that it's possible for a human brain to function as differently from the norm as a psychopath's does, or that it can just be a natural state from birth, rather than a trauma response - so they see traits like lack of empathy, lack of guilt etc, and assume that they must be the result of emotional damage in childhood, and therefore not so different from other conditions with similar traits.
That's why your writing is so important Athena, because I don't think it's possible to read more than 5 or 10 of your posts, especially the stories from everyday life and childhood, and not understand that psychopathy is very very different. Some of the signs of psychopathy are so unusual and absolute (never falling in love, no emotions attached to memories, zero fear etc), and so unrelated to anything that would be likely to result from trauma, that it's almost impossible not to conclude that it's a completely different class of condition than all the others. Even without brain scans & research etc, the absoluteness of the symptoms alone strongly suggests that something is very fundamentally different about a psychopath's brain, beyond what could be explained by any degree of trauma.
The world is just not quite getting it just yet, but one day it will.
thank you for your excellent post and observations.
Athena's work really is important. One day we may look back and say: "hey. I knew her when we could talk with her directly on her substack".
LOL. Best!!
Ha! Well so far she seems to be making more headway in dispelling the myths than the other 8 billion people on this planet combined, so maybe she will be famous one day, who knows! More famous than Hare if there's any justice in the world lol :o)
All that noise can wait until after I have departed this world.
Yes, dispelling myths: So true, Jen!
Maybe AW publishes a workbook or the like, to explore our own selves!!
Imagine after a rigorous 6 week self evaluation, it comes back:
Congratulations! You are NT, however now you understand why.
I'd like to place an order for 8B workbooks, please. lol
That doctor is very annoying. His idea of a psychopath is more like a psychological Chimera. I am still not sure why so many people care so much about psychopathy. Weirdly, this reminds me of some people’s fascination with Jews and all the strange conflicting things they attribute to us.
It is similar, I agree. I had a conversation with someone over on Quora, who gave me a history lesson on the history of antisemitism, not defending it, just giving me the background. Even learning the history of it, I do not understand how people think that it's remotely logical. There is a very similar refusal to hear logical arguments when it comes to antisemitism, and psychopathy. It vexes me.
I was explaining what I call Wolf Time to a friend. You’re driving in fog and the limits of your fog light is 15 minutes ahead and the rear view is likely less. That’s Wolf Time and that’s my world.
Sounds about right
so basically, "you keep using that word [psychopath]. i do not think it means what you think it means."
this all really does sound like projection
Agreed
As an undergrad, I worried I wouldn't be smart enough for a PhD. Articles like this one convince me that I would've done just fine.
I doubt you would have struggled
"...do you think that a psychopath can walk into a company out of the blue, and that company just immediately ushers them into the corner office, slapping down the CEO nameplate?"
I think it's happened a few times. There was that guy who lied about all of his experience and became an effective CEO for at least a year until a completely unrelated document check revealed the lie. There was an argument to keep him on because he was effective but HR had its way and he was out, but he can put former CEO on the resume now.
There's that one doctor who just lied and said he was a surgeon and he'd just cram session the specific operation he had to do the night before. He was also incredibly good at his job because the psychopath nerves of steel never-choke were more important to being a surgeon than any particular knowledge. In fact, when I reviewed the surgeon training in general, most of it is to get a person to the level of emotional detachment psychopaths have as a default.
I think it's this guy
https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/impostor-pretended-navy-surgeon-korean-war/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/ferdinand-waldo-demara-the-great-imposter-con-artist-fraud-a9080991.html
"In the ultimate example of “fake it til you make it,” Ferdinand Demara boarded the HMCS Cayuga, a Canadian Navy destroyer during the Korean War. He was impersonating a doctor, which was fine until the ship started taking on more serious casualties and Demara was left as the ship’s only “surgeon”.
This is the point where most people would throw up their hands and announce the game was up, but Demara wasn’t ultimately labeled “the Great Imposter” for nothing. He had a photographic memory and a very high IQ.
So the new doctor went into his quarters for a few minutes with a medical textbook, came back out and then operated the 16 badly injured troops — including one who required major chest surgery — and saved them all."
That is not, "out of the blue".
I think you could actually make a good case for the idea that psychopathy isn't a 'disorder' at all, it's just an alternative evolutionary path that humanity took a very very long time ago. So while most of us were evolving to have pro-social emotions because they help us to manage relationships with others and therefore to live in groups, with all the protections and survival advantages that affords - a small subset of humans evolved in a different direction, based on a genetic mutation which switches those pro-social emotions off.
Because while switching off oxytocin has it's disadvantages from a survival point of view, for example the lack of fear causing psychopaths to take risks with their own safety, it also undoubtedly has huge advantages too, especially the calmness and clear thinking in stressful situations. I know who I would rather have by my side in a crisis! To me it's not hard to see why a genetic mutation like that might survive to the present day in a small percentage of humans, rather than dying out.
In all honestly I think psychopathy is only seen as a disorder because it exists in a 99% neurotypical world, where mainly neurotypicals make the rules and define terms. So psychopathy is viewed as a disorder because it's so obviously a departure from the norm, and people focus on the ways that it tends to be more problematic than being neurotypical, rather than the ways it's less problematic.
But I think that objectively speaking you'd have to admit that both psychopathic and neurotypical ways of experiencing the world have both advantages and disadvantages, and when you consider the awful things emotions drive people to do sometimes, you could argue that the neurotypical way of being is just as pathological from the psychopathic perspective, as the psychopathic way of being is from the neurotypical perspective.
Well, as I've suggested for quite some time...
POTUS
(Pretty sure you'll be the only individual that gets this. Maybe Invisigoth.)
hey, Eve. Happy Saturday. Pardon my intrusion. Are you suggesting DJT is a psychopath? If so: no. For the good of our world, I wish he was.
Study of prison population for ANY insight, just plain silly as you make clear: Violent crimes and circumstances have no statue of limitations. Those revealing their violent crimes are those with nothing left to lose or seek attention or status, especially protecting their own self in prison life.
Apparently it wasn't always like this: The three main characters in the Bible, Moses, David, Paul, were all murderers.
The crimes didn't ruin the story, they ARE the story, and doesn't really seem that big a deal.
Even the first dust up, Cain kills Able. He got some minor punishment (by GOD himself if I read it right). He still had his freedom and could tell his story to anyone interested.
Very different today.