The title of this blog post is based
on a kind of half-awake, half-asleep dream I had last night (possibly brought
about by the recent mass shooting in Orlando, and the killing of MP Jo Cox in
West Yorkshire, although one can't be sure).
Psychopaths have always been a bit of
an enigma to psychologists: their morals, their empathy levels, what their
inner-self is like, and how they perceive the outside world have been topics of
study for many years (which is also one of several reasons why I think we are best
not putting people to death, even for heinous crimes).
Psychopaths are certainly different to
most other humans, and this plays out with a complex combination of genetic
factors (as evidenced by studies of monozygotic twins and their genetic
predispositions for genetic personality disorders) and, of course environment
and the concomitant socialisation.
It’s worth considering just how
similar to each other we are as a species – phenotypically, genotypically – we
are so alike in our mental composition that if we had a shared existence in
exactly the same culture, the same environment, the same health and well-being,
and with the same access to knowledge, we would reach the same conclusions
about a great many more things than we do.
It may
surprise you to hear this but biologically (that’s genotypically) we are almost
identical to Paleolithic man – and those primitive traits that helped those
distant ancestors reproduce are not all that absent in modern humans.
There's probably a pretty good
evolutionary truth in that – and we know that post-social contract humans are behaviorally
enormously different from the more primitive homo-sapiens, and this is so much
truer regarding our distant ancestors, whose comparable absence of conscience
and empathy would violate even the basic social norms and expectations for modern
social harmony.
Picture in your head two things:
1) A modern day psychopath.
2) A primitive man alive long before
we began to develop any formal, communicable sense of morality.
While it's obviously a lot more
complex than what I'm now going to say, there may well be a kernel of truth in
the fact that when one considers those well known tendencies we observe in
modern day psychopathy, such as cunningness, lack of remorse or guilt,
emotional shallowness, lacking in empathy, failure to accept responsibility for
their own actions, revocation of conditional release, a parasitic lifestyle,
poor behavioural control, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsiveness, and
irresponsibility, we can see that these all bear quite a close resemblance to traits
of our primitive-human past, in that they might well have qualified as being in
some way comparable (stress the word 'comparable', not the same) to a modern
day psychopath if they were brought into modern day social surroundings.
