The Slippery Slope Of The Normative Human

It is time to stop pathologizing human nature...

Photo by Muhammad Daudy on Unsplash

All right, first of all, I have to say, what is that sign in the photo trying to warn people away from? I decided to use it because it suited my purpose, but in all practicality… what? If anyone knows, let me know in the comments section. I don’t even know if it’s a real sign. Anyway, I digress, that is not the purpose of this post. Can you imagine if it was though? You all came here to read something about psychopathy and I just talked about signposts for a bunch of paragraphs and then just f*cked off?

Actually… it sounds kind of fun…

Not what I am going to do, however. In this post, we are going to talk about why psychopath should not be the go-to for labeling people that do things that the general public consider bad, or whatever other negative action or event that they seek to wave away from their own neurotype.

What do I mean by this? There are many occasions that psychopath is hauled out as a reason why someone or a group of people does something. This is not a political post, and I am not interested in discussing politics, but this does happen a great deal when people are referring to politicians. One of the people that I enjoy listening to the commentary of has a habit of doing this, and while it annoys me a bit that they use the term without having an understanding of what it means, there is a larger picture to the behavior, and it is one that needs to end.

I have talked about “othering” a great deal. This behavior does have ties to othering, but that isn’t exactly what is going on in this case, and many others. There is numerous time this occurs, but in this particular one, it is easier to explain my meaning.

Politicians talk a good game, and they tend to promise a lot of things, but when it comes down to it they don’t want to solve the problems because they need a wedge issue. That is why when they are the party in charge, they still don’t do anything. They are more interested in campaigning than doing their actual job. This is true regardless of the party, and when political leaders seem like they hate one another, call each other out, and grandstand on some issue or another, most people don’t realize that is all an act. They’re friends, and they care about stuff for them. Not you.

This behavior is not unique to politicians, and it certainly is not something that is psychopathic in nature. It’s human nature. Stuff for me, not for thee. That’s the way it works. And while I can understand that this is confusing and makes people angry when they understand that’s what is happening, it doesn’t make it anything other than just that, human nature.

People love to call politicians psychopaths. Even the person that I enjoy listening to, and there is a significant problem in doing so. It isn’t that psychopaths aren’t self-interested, we are, and there is no arguing that. It’s that psychopaths do not have the numbers to make up the majority of anything. There are seventy-million of us, and frankly, politics is a sh*tshow, that I have no interest in, and neither does the other psychopath that I know.

Most politicians are neurotypical. I am certain there is a mix of neurotypes in any political leadership, but most are neurotypical. They make up the vast percentage of the population on the planet. When people get angry at them and call their behavior psychopathic, they are removing that behavior from the realm of being normal, and making it into something abnormal. What that does is make a barrier between the ability to understand them and their actions.

This often comes from the notion that people consider themselves hardwired to be good, and if someone doesn’t fit into this idea that humans are inherently good, they have to explain the behavior of those that do not choose to be so in ways that are understandable to their worldview.

If you believe that you are hardwired to be good, and that you live a “good” life without examining that life at all or having that challenged in some significant way that gives you the ability to test that out and then make a good decision… well, that alone should tell you that you probably aren’t nearly as good as you think that you are, but if this is your mindset, then you will be unable to comprehend those that do things that you consider “bad”. If they are bad, they must be different. Psychopaths are different, so that is what they must be.

Sorry, not how it works, but this mentality is removing your ability to understand humans as a whole. The assumption that people do bad things because they are psychopathic, not people choosing to do bad things because they want stuff for them, removes your ability to predict the consequences of that sort of thinking.

They aren’t psychopaths. They’re just like you. If you believe that they are somehow different you are going to have blinders on to the evils that humans do without there needing to be anything different about them. Psychopaths can certainly do bad things, I am not denying that at all. What I am saying instead is, if you think that all the bad things in the world are done by some “other”, you will be constantly living in a state of anger and frustration.

It’s easy to call a person a psychopath and have that be it. It gives you no information, and it does nothing to help fix the problem. Othering is projection, but as I said, there is more to this than that. You can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge. If you think that the bad behavior of a group is in some way removed from you because of your fundamental but incorrect assumptions about people, you will never be able to solve the issue that is causing problems to begin with.

I don’t understand why people want so badly to make it about another group in the first place. That would be giving your power to that group in an unreasonable way. If you have no way to understand why things like this happen, you will never have insight as to how to make it work better, or at the very least select people that won’t be swayed by the power and money.

I think it is very evident that people don’t understand how psychopaths think, but that could be helped along a great deal by first learning how your own neurotype thinks and where the problems lie there. First, however, you are going to have to understand that these people are wired just like you. They are making different choices based on different priorities than you, but that is because they have the option to do so.

It is very easy to sit and judge the things that people who get power do. It is very easy to assume that they make those choices because they are wicked and rotten to the core, and therefore obviously psychopathic, but that isn’t the case. They are a normative human that made good choices because the options in front of them didn’t allow for the bad ones. If when you do something there are consequences, most people factor this into their decision and usually will behave in the long-term self-interest of their lives. You aren’t going to do something that will blow your life up legally, socially, or emotionally.

What happens when those consequences are removed? If you have power, you also have protection. You have the option to start exploring that internal darkness, and it is very easy to take that step and turns into a slide. Suddenly, you won’t get into trouble, there are people that will cover for you. In fact, they want you to take that step, because then they will own you. Join the club, there aren’t consequences for us, and do whatever you want to do, just don’t let the public find out.

It isn’t immediate that people decide to start indulging the parts of them that they couldn’t before, it takes a little time, but if you want to stay in power you will have to make some sacrifices, and if you don’t play ball, you will be removed. Think about the mentality of someone that really does want to do good, but in order to do so they have to partake in corruption. It is an easy wager to be made with their souls. It’s just a little bit, but if I want to do what I want for the people that put me here, that little bit is an all right compromise.

Once you see behind the curtain, it is very difficult to stay with your principles intact. Walking down into more and more darkness is just how it goes. They want to do their best, so they compromise. They want to get something done, so they compromise. They want to make sure their family is taken care of, so they compromise. They want to be reelected, so they compromise. I can list a thousand reasons that someone in that position would use to justify still walking that path, but the fact is, they aren’t walking it because they are evil. They are doing so because in their lives before these offered choices weren’t available to them, and now they are.

It’s easy to not do terrible things or betray the people that put you where you are when those people are your family and you have to see them every day. Those choices weren’t even things you had to consider making, because they had no relevance to your life. Now they do, and they are the devil’s deal. Shake that first hand, and it’s easier to shake the next. Principles be damned, you can now do and have things you could never have imagined.

This is true in many places, politics is just one of them. People often live by unexamined principles. Once you deny the normalcy of the choices that these people make, you remove any and all chances of understanding how to perhaps remove those problems to begin with.

Once a person is acclimated to being able to do whatever they want without consequences, many of them will indulge truly heinous things that regular people cannot comprehend. That in and of itself is the problem. They cannot comprehend it because they don’t think about how the person got there to begin with.

This is a problem for the understanding of many things, and as much as humans would like to believe that they are good and that they are tolerant, most humans not only suck at both of those, they are inherently judgy as well. For instance, you hear about a crime that you are just horrified by, and want the person to be put under the prison for it. However, it is almost never that the person is like, hey, you know what? Rape and murder is an excellent way to pass the time. I could join a murder mystery group, but no, rape and murder are definitely better.

Have a look at this guy:

He is a very normal-looking, even pleasant-looking young man, and he was a few years ago. Something in his life changed and it changed dramatically, and this young man became internet famous. Not for good reasons though.

A year ago this happened: (don’t watch if you scare easily)

In July of last year that very same young man, the one in the thumbnail above this, went to a house and was captured on a Ring doorbell. He was talking to himself, he was answering himself, and he had seen the woman that lived in this house through her kitchen window. He proceeds to knock, while still talking to himself, saying the same things over and over to himself while trying to lure her to open the door. She never interacts with him, but instead hides and phones police. As it is a Ring doorbell, however, her husband who was not at home at the time demanded to know who he was and what he wanted.

His response? He wanted the girl inside to open the door so he could rape and kill her. He had a knife and he had a gun with him. He is absolutely flat when he says this repeatedly to her husband. There is no emotion, and there is no compunction with saying what he does. Out of context, and even in context I’m sure, people will refer to him as a psychopath. He isn’t, he has severe mental health issues. So much so that he is in custody being evaluated to see if he even has the capability to stand trial. His name is Christopher Sumbs, and he went from having a fully functioning life to being a fugitive from California when the Ring video was captured.

How did he go from this:

to this?

I don’t know, but I guarantee you that it is easier for people to say that he is a psychopath than it is for them to consider what that journey much have been like for him.

I am in no way saying that you should feel sorry for this man. As I said, I don’t know what caused this, but something did, and brought him from a man that had a lot going for him to a man that is sitting in a psych ward waiting to be told whether or not he can stand trial for the things that he has done. Is it drugs? Maybe. More likely mental illness that he self-medicated. I can tell you this, in that mugshot, he’s only forty years old. That is a steep and rapid decline.

It is important to understand that you don’t know what you don’t know, and the behaviors that are so often detestable to the normative person aren’t outside their own capability. It isn’t psychopathy that causes people to be greedy, it’s human nature. You have to understand what it is that brings a person from what you can understand into what you can’t. If you aren’t able to figure that out then you aren’t aware of where there are problems. Don’t skip all the steps and arrive at the easy answer. As Christopher’s images and behavior tell us, those really don’t exist.