(this article originally appeared on the blog 'Lord of the Flies')
They say that one man in every 100 is a psychopath. And one woman in every 300. Not too uncommon! And they say that 20 in every 100 prison inmates are psychopaths. I don’t know their sources.
In case you haven’t heard of it yet, a psychopath is defined as a person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behaviour without empathy or remorse. Once you absorb this meaning, it’s not difficult to guess why psychopaths are more concentrated in prison cells. Ted Bundy was an infamous psychopath, now you know what I mean.
Many psychologists recognise the existence of psychopathic behaviour, supported by evidences in brain imaging that suggests that all psychopaths have something in their brain that is similar to each other but different from the rest of the population. It is also believed to have a strong genetic component, and some evolutionary benefits that go with being a psychopath in a society which is not entirely composed of psychopaths, since they can take advantage of other people in that case. A defining characteristic of the psychopath is the non-existence of the feeling of ‘remorse’. A psychopathic kid might be the one who brutally tortures a cat and laughs as he/she does that. In short, it’s more like Satan himself taken the form of a human.
There is a large body of literature about psychopaths, and it is a well established subject. One of the interesting ones that I’ve found online is here. All psychopaths are not violent, however, because violence might not always serve the best of their interests, but their distinguishing factor is that they are abnormally remorseless. Psychopaths do understand that there is something different about them, but they have no difficulty in emulating the behaviour of the people around them. Psychopaths are, therefore, not shady/mysterious people, but people in the heart of the society, sometimes even the leaders.
When I had heard about psychopaths for the first time, it made me very scared that something like that exists and is not too uncommon. However, it made me feel kind of relaxed, that now I had found an explanation for many crimes that otherwise seem illogical and irrational. A poor guy killing a rich guy to rob his money might be bad, but there is some crude economic logic in there. There’s hardly any logic for psychopathic behaviour.
In one of the philosophy lectures I attended online, there was a passing mention of psychopathy. The lecturer called it a ‘sickness’, or pathology, arising from some absent associations in the brain that doesn’t allow one to perceive another as a living being with some emotions and feelings. He had also given an example of an entire psychopathic society with a more restricted form of psychopathy, where the whites in America might not have been psychopathic towards each other but they were psychopathic towards their black slaves. It’s some sort of objectification of another person or creature, which may be because of Nature or Nurture.
And then there are these psychopath apologists with their books, blogs and websites. Some say that if psychopathy is a sickness, then those guilty of crimes shouldn’t be made accountable of them. On the other hand, some give pep talks to the psychopaths, saying that it’s okay to be a psychopath and that they shouldn’t feel bad about it and that they can still lead a normal life, etc.
However, there is no satisfactory or absolute test to declare whether a person is a psychopath or not. And the tests that do exist occasionally come out positive for some friends of mine, whom I know beyond doubt aren’t psychopaths. That made me doubt this theory. A lot of books and websites even define psychopathy differently. On top of that, many articles on psychopaths are often followed by comments claiming, “My teacher is a psychopath because she did this...,” or “My mom/day is a psychopath,” or “My wife/husband is a psychopath,” or the funniest of all, “Bush is a psychopath”,etc. That shows that the article is totally lost on them. People can just be plain selfish or narcissistic or shallow, but that doesn’t mean they are all psychopaths.
And then I happened to hear this last speech by Ted Bundy hours before his execution. I knew about his gruesome record. But to me he just seemed crazy, somewhat stupid, but not a psychopath. The guy in the story 'perfume' is more of a psychopath, and so is Hannibal, but they are fictional.
So, do psychopaths exist? I doubt it very much.
This new concept of psychopath strongly reminds me of the ancient belief in Satan. Unimaginably bad and sinister things that people had no explanation for was attributed to the work of Satan. People could have made a ‘deal’ with Satan, or they could have been possessed by an evil spirit. And that we always contrast with the ‘good’. It’s always black or white. It’s always ‘them’ versus ‘us’. We somehow have this tendency to like such ideas.
Why are we so reticent to move out of our comfort zone and acknowledge the grey? How many people wonder about what went on in the mind of the criminal as he was committing the crime, what went on before that and after that? No one wants to think about the unpleasant things. Of course it is uncomfortable, but if we let that remain black and mysterious we are never going to get past it. We are never going to find a solution to the problem if we don’t even acknowledge that there is a problem and just continue to punish criminals. Of course we should punish criminals, but will it not be better if we parallely make efforts to the effect that the criminal psychology does not take over the minds of individuals?
Crimes are borne out of depravity. It might be money, it might be emotions. It might not be a direct consequence but there's always a very indirect link. If someone has lost it and committed gruesome crimes, isn’t it obvious that there will be something different in their brain because of which they lost it so easily in the first place? If a psychopathic kid is selfish and remorseless, what pleasure could he possibly get by torturing a cat? There is no pleasure centre in the brain that gets activated by torturing random creatures. There has to be a suppressed vengeance, or else a suppressed bully inside the child, which might have arisen out of some emotional depravity.
There are no dark characters. There is no Satan. We have to stop thinking that ‘they’ are the bad ones. ‘They’ are some of ‘us’. They might be past reasoning, but there must be some way to get to the core of the problem. And even if that problem is irreversible, to detect the origins of the problem and make sure that such things are prevented in the future. A theory of Psychopaths seems to be an escapist theory, just like an easy way out, without addressing the more real problems. The thought that some people are just bad and one can do nothing about it! It's illogical vilification of people. Like they used to vilify 'witches' once.
I know that the theory of Psychopathy dominates a lot of psychological studies but the more I read, the more unconvinced I am. Some researchers believe that there are varying degrees of psychopathy. Now that sounds more plausible, but hey, isn’t it the same as saying, there are varying degrees of bad people? That’s certainly not enlightening.
Notwithstanding all the literature on psychopaths, some written by self-proclaimed psychopaths, I would still say that the psychopath is the modern-day devil. There is a mystery, for sure, but it cannot be unsolvable. We just got to expand our horizon and think from the weirdest points of view.
Or probably I don't understand because I might be a psychopath! ;)
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