
The Psychopath - The Mask of Sanity - cj
http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/psychopath.htm
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DLWormwood
I was agreeing with the essay until I got to about the 75% mark, and it went
off-tangent about how religion helps enable psychopathology, despite
explicitly avoiding the topic for most of the paper. (I should have taken the
mention of "Indigo children" as a warning sign, despite the paper treating
that as more of a kind of fashion rather than a religious concept.)

It turns out that this page appears to be SEO content bait for a constellation
of crack-pot sites dating from 2005, most notably "Signs of the Times" and
9/11 conspiracy theorists.

<http://www.cassiopaea.org/cass/site_map_qfg.htm>

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anthonyb
Why is it off tangent? It makes sense to me that systems like religion or
government are easily subverted. I also read the "Indigo Children" part as
being critical of the concept, ie. pandering to psychopaths.

Not that they're not crackpots - the conclusion of the article is pretty wacky
- but your criticism is a little off.

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DLWormwood
I know this is a late response, but...

My concern is that the article felt like that for cases of institutional
corruption, the article reasoned, "A, therefore C" instead of saying "A
implies B, B implies C, therefore A implies C." The article didn't adequately
give the reader reasoning or context for an anti-institutional slam out of the
blue like that. (For religion, a few paragraphs discussing historical examples
like the Inquisition or pedophile priests would have both strengthened the
argument and smoothed out the narrative.)

~~~
anthonyb
An even later response :)

That section comes right on the tail of discussing how pscyhopathy seems to be
an inherited trait, and that there seems to be a lot of evidence, at least
anecdotally, for children who have much of the same behaviours as psychopaths.
So it doesn't seem that out of place to me.

The anti-institutional 'slam' was just them pointing out that a lot of the
religious doctrines seem to follow a psychopathic 'rationale', ie. here is the
truth, now don't question it. My reading was that it was almost an
epidemiological study on psychopaths subverting social organisations (since
that's how they seem to work individually).

Of course, the article is mostly anecdotal evidence, so it's hard to tell how
seriously to take this, but it's certainly food for thought.

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techiferous
I think sometimes we are a little too eager to attach labels to people. There
are a couple of problems with labels:

1\. A label is a heuristic. It's a quick way of getting an approximate picture
of a person. If somebody introduces you to Rick as "a former Republican
senator from South Dakota" your mind is already filling in lots of blanks
about Rick with categories like "male", "senator", "Republican" and "South
Dakotan". Our mind gives us a head-start in knowing about Rick. The problem
comes when we don't allow ourselves to revise this rough-draft picture of
Rick. Perhaps we think all Republicans are like X, so Rick is like X.
Therefore, we don't bother looking for information about whether Rick is like
X, because we already _know_. Labels can get in the way of actually knowing
somebody.

2\. A label often carries the implicit assumption that the aspects of the
person in question are immutable. In other words, people don't change. It's
different to say someone is a "psychopath" instead of "going through a
psychopathic phase".

"In other words, psychopathy is being recognized as a more or less a different
type of human."

This quote really bothered me. This completely dehumanizes "psychopaths." They
are officially "the other". <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other>

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danbmil99
Sheesh, this is simplistic. The world is a complex place, and there are niches
for all sorts of personality types. People can be cold-blooded about killing
but care about their family (Tony Soprano?)

A good show about all this is "Damages". Mad Men gets it too -- simple
morality narratives, where everyone is binary good/evil, do not reflect the
richness of human character.

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primodemus
"Cheating skills seem to have an adaptive value in our society. The fact is:
psychopaths often end up on the top of the heap, John Forbes Nash, for
example." John Nash is schizophrenic, not psycopath.

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greenlblue
You know what another word for psychopath is? Asshole. It's easy to spot them
and it's easy to avoid them so calm down. It's not a full blown epidemic and
these people have been around since the beginning of time.

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dhughes
Not always, or at least they're not so obvious, some pretend to be your friend
and to console you all the while they are the ones causing you harm.

A better word may be "manager".

~~~
greenlblue
My point was that this article takes a long and winding road to reach the
simple conclusion that some people are simply assholes and there is nothing to
be done about it because they are built differently and the article makes it
all sound really menacing. There is nothing menacing here. Most assholes have
the same profile so it's really easy to figure them out after you've come into
contact with a few of them. Turning it into a research program is in my
opinion a waste of money which is the other thing the article seems to
advocate.

~~~
confuzatron
The authors argue that people in general (unlike you) are not good at spotting
psychopaths, that psychopathy is an increasingly successful evolutionary
strategy, that psychos are controlling society to help nurture their psycho
offspring, whom certain in-denial hippies have dubbed 'indigo children'.

I thought the whole thing was immensely entertaining (but I'm just saying that
to stave off the terror).

